FYI: Promise TX4 silent corruption (RELENG_7)

Hello,

The following is not a request for help or bug report as such, I just
want to put the information out there in case it helps other people by
encouraging active checking for silent data corruption (also happens
to be a good "saved yet again by ZFS" story).

I was moving some disks to a machine that didn't have SATA ports for
them, so I took one of the TX4:s I had left over since some previous
desperate attempts to get working SATA in another machine.

At first, things *seemed* good. No DMA timeouts or anything like
that. Streamed through 4 250 gig drives no problem; ran a bunch of
rsyncs of ports trees during the night.

However, once I started dd:ing large files and reading them back in I
started getting I/O errors from ZFS, because of checksum
mismatches. Turns out all the drives connected to the TX4 in the
raidz2 were generating checksum errors (the one that was not connected
to the TX4 was fine). Write a 2-3 gig file of zeroes -> handful of
checksum mismatches on subsequent scrub.

Since then I have now tried two distinct TX4 cards (but only in one
PCI slot). Both suffer from the same problem. Amazingly a SiI 3114
*does* seem to work in the same PCI slot - no corruption, and no DMA
timeouts and whatnot that I was expecting from a SiI card.

This was on amd64, RELENG_7. Same SATA cables used on all
drives. Drives on TX4 were also in a Supermicro hotswap enclosure,
which may or may not be related (but again, no problem with SiI).

--
/ Peter Schuller

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