Hello.  I'm still working on configuring my mammoth
array of IDE disks as a raid 5 array.  I've now got 15 disks active, with
one hot spare, and one bootable disk, making a total of 17 IDE disks in one
box.  And, We've installed short enough cables so that we can do dma to the
disks now without trouble.  We cannot transfer more than 63 sectors at a
time , so we're striping with 63 sector stripes.  Using cylider stripes of
1008 sectors doesn't seem to work, it seems to overload the PCI bus.
	However, I'm writing about a much more mundane problem.  
It looks like /etc/rc.d/raidframe starts up the raid arrays on a system if
their configuration files are in /etc/raid0-3.conf.  Then, it runs the
parity checker on each of the configured arrays and stuffs that check in
background.  My question is, isn't this behavior wrong, since, you don't
want to run fsck on  an raid array whose parity is unclean?  And, wouldn't
you want to wait for the parity check to complete before beginning normal
operation  on the array itself?  Doesn't putting this process in background
cause fsck and mount to proceed before the parity calculation, if it's
necessary, is done?
If I'm wrong could someone tell me and why?  I'll then leave the
backgrounding there.
-thanks
-Brian