While you're all talking about RAID...

I am running (er, not for long) an Abit BP6 with 2x Celeron 500's as my fileserver, router, openvpn server and asterisk play machine under Gentoo.

On the hardware setup before this, I had a linux software RAID1 arrangement with a pair of 120GB Seagates on a Promise 20269 Ultra TX2 controller. It was sweet, and never missed a beat.

Now when I moved to the BP6 that I have atm, I thought I'd just use the Highpoint HPT366 that is onboard. It worked a-ok for a while, and last night it just spazzed out on me. The array resynced and the filesystem (reiserfs. why? i don't know) was saying it needed a fsck.

It was like, bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep and then, like, my filesystem wouldn't mount, and I was like, unngh. It devoured my FLACs, and then I had to rip them again...

The PC had been crashing recently, the logs were filling with

Code:
ide: failed opcode was: unknown

hdg: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x21

hdg: DMA timeout error

hdg: dma timeout error: status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest }

and

Code:
Sep 13 07:03:10 peaches APIC error on CPU1: 02(02)

Sep 13 07:04:55 peaches APIC error on CPU0: 08(08)

and one drive losing DMA which made resyncing take forever. reiserfsck --rebuild-tree says there is a hardware error.

Basically I'm fed up with this BP6 and its very strange stability (it will be fine for 6 months... and then go crazy... and then miraculously fix itself). Tomorrow it will be replaced with a Abit/VIA/Sempron setup and my old Promise PCI IDE controller.
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Hussein