On Fri, Jan 19, 2001 at 05:56:34AM -0800, Brian Buhrow wrote:
> 	Actually, I put 11 drives in a single raid 5 array, and 
> made the 12th drive a hot spare.  The parity calculation seems to take
> about
> 24 hours, and while it's running, it takes a half hour to login.  This is
> on an Intel motherboard with a 733MHZ cpu and 256MB of memory.  I'm hoping
> this is just the pain of initialization, but if it keeps up this way, I
> don't know how useful it will be.  We're currently waiting for the second
> attempt at parity initialization to complete.  I've also been making the
> stripe size smaller in an effort to lower the per disk i/o request size to
> keep individual i/o errors from the too long IDE cables from spoiling the
> party.  So far, so good.  Unfortunately, Manuel says that the limit for
> UDMA100 cables is 18 inches.  Our cables are 24 inches, and we have no
> physical way of shortening the cables and reasonably installing these disks
> in a box compatible with the cooling requirements to run so many disks.
> So, other than living with the slower disk performance with these  longer
> cables, is there anything we can do?

Try to force the drives to use Ultra/33 (with 'flags 0xa00' on the
wd* line in your kernel config file).
What controllers do you have ?

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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