Zevo ZFS with Promise R4 & Mac Mini

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Zevo ZFS with Promise R4 & Mac Mini

Post by jasonturner » Wed Mar 27, 2013 6:00 pm

I've been having issues with my system where the Promise R4 (which has the ZFS storage pool) and storage on my Mac Mini freeze after a certain amount of time. It seems that this happens after copying several GB's of data (greater than 25GB-30GB).

Promise has sent me 3 replacement units and they all act the same so the next step was to see if this had anything to do with Zevo...

Is anyone else having issues similar to this?
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Post by grahamperrin » Wed Mar 27, 2013 8:57 pm

Stalling issues with Promise R4 array

Can you describe the freeze in your case?
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Re: Zevo ZFS with Promise R4 & Mac Mini

Post by jasonturner » Thu Mar 28, 2013 3:17 pm

The RAID becomes unresponsive as well as the entire system, requiring power to be cut. I was thinking it could be a buss buffer issue because it affects the ZFS RAID on the R4 as well as other drives. The finder will become intermittently responsive or completely unresponsive and when I use Terminal to shutdown or killall - the system hangs. Again, this only seems to happen after copying large amounts of data - in excess of 25GB. The Promise R4's blue lights just stop blinking and the unit shows no activity and the power buttons won't turn off the unit.

I'm also using Bitcasa and have been copying large amounts of data into the cloud. When the system freezes that will show (in the Finder menu bar) a certain number of MB's remaining - generally 32MB or 64MB but never over 100MB.

Also it doesn't matter if I'm using the ZFS RAID for copying - I copied data to an external USB drive and have been experiencing the same thing. Very odd and just can't explain it yet.

After receiving 3 different replacement chassis' from Promise, they suggested we look into ZFS because that seemed to be the only difference.
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More details please

Post by grahamperrin » Thu Mar 28, 2013 8:11 pm

Thanks. I'm unfamiliar with the PROMISE range. Is this R4 specifically one of the two Pegasus solutions (PDF)?

Does the preference suggested in the earlier topic work around the issue here?

Postscripts

What's your OS version and build?

In a private forum a few weeks ago someone had trouble with a Thunderbolt Promise Pegasus R4 wiith OS X Mountain Lion with RAID 5 (without ZEVO). Red alerts for reportedly improper ejects. At some point after encountering trouble, the user disabled power management on the Pegasus. In mid-January 2013 that topic was without conclusion, it's unclear which combination of settings (in the Apple OS and at the PROMISE) were then in effect. 26169
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Re: Zevo ZFS with Promise R4 & Mac Mini

Post by jasonturner » Fri Mar 29, 2013 12:11 pm

Yes, this is the R4 of the two Pegasus solutions. Interesting... I just disabled the power management on R4, it's worth a shot!

The R4 is configured as having the (4) 1TB drives in pass-thru mode (JBOD) so it isn't using the controller on the R4.

I'm running Mountain Lion 10.8.3, latest Zevo Community Edition on a a 2011 Mac Mini.

Thanks for the links and suggestion. I'll run some more copies. As a work around I was going to have the system reboot every night...
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Post by grahamperrin » Fri Mar 29, 2013 12:23 pm

If it helps to shape your thinking: with different hardware (hard disk drives on a low-cost USB 2.0 hub with a MacBookPro5,2), the computer may successfully sleep and wake during a send and receive.
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