Greetings--

I have 4 SATA disks configured as 2 raid-1 arrays on a 4.3 box (i386).

# bioctl -c 1 -l /dev/sd0a,/dev/sd1a softraid0
# bioctl -c 1 -l /dev/sd2a,/dev/sd3a softraid0

sd0a and sd1a are sd4, sd2a and sd3a are sd5:
# bioctl softraid0                                                                                              
Volume  Status               Size Device  
softraid0 0 Online       750153704448 sd5     RAID1
      0 Online       750153704448 0:0.0   noencl <sd2a>
      1 Online       750153704448 0:1.0   noencl <sd3a>
softraid0 1 Online       750153704448 sd4     RAID1
      0 Online       750153704448 1:0.0   noencl <sd0a>
      1 Online       750153704448 1:1.0   noencl <sd1a>

All was perfect until a reboot... now even though the output from bioctl is the same, sd0a and sd1a are really sd5, and sd2a and sd3a are sd4, according to 'vmstat iostat' during an 'fsck -fy /dev/sd4a':


    4 users    Load  0.42  0.30  0.32                  Thu May 15 13:06:42 2008
                    
Device           rKBytes        wKBytes        rtps       wtps         sec
wd0                    0              0           0          0         0.0
cd0                    0              0           0          0         0.0
sd0                    0              0           0          0         0.0
sd1                    0              0           0          0         0.0
sd2                13656              0         220          0         0.2
sd3                13924              0         220          0         0.2
sd4                27580              0         439          0         0.4
sd5                    0              0           0          0         0.0
Totals             55160              0         879          0         0.9

And the data for sd4a is really on sd2 and sd3, as verified by physically removing disks sd0 and sd1 and seeing what's there on the next boot. And bioctl shows sd4 or sd5 even when only one pair of disks is in the machine and softraid puts the new array on sd2.

So far, this hasn't caused a problem as far as the data goes. I noticed it after copying tens of gigs over to the array. The only effect seems to be a mismatch between the device used by softraid and the label reported by bioctl after the first boot since array creation. Is having two arrays with softraid safe yet?

Frank