G
George Macdonald
Again, I'd rather avoid .storage aggro but this one has me baffled: I
have a K8 system (Athlon64 3500+ on a MSI K8N Neo4-F) which is used as a
File/Print/DNS server with a Promise Fasttrak100 TX2 PCI card swappable
RAID-1 set up. This was a hot-swappable RAID kit sold by Promise called a
Fasttrak100 TX2 Pro
http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail.asp?product_id=4 and it's
been working fine for 4-5 years now. I bought two complete kits so I'd
have four drawers and a spare controller.
On Saturday, one of the RAID array drives started dropping out of "ready",
triggering a rebuild, followed by repeating "drop-outs" and rebuilds... so
Sunday I trudged off to the office to err, fix it. We have four
identical Seagate UDMA-100 drives and one of the active pair gets swapped
once per week.
With the swappable drawers/enclosures etc. it took me a while to boil this
down to the "faulty part" but here's the essence of it: the drive which
failed to rebuild gives faulty sectors on every single sector with the
Seagate Seatools diagnostics when connected to the Promise Fasttrak100 TX2
PCI card; the same drive passes OK when connected to the motherboard
IDE-PATA connector.
This is with the same IDE cable -- tried with several 80-wire conductor
cables, including two fresh ones -- connecting the drive directly to the
IDE ports, i.e. without the enclosures. All the other three drives pass
diagnostics, and work fine in real use, when connected to the Fasttrak100
TX2; I also tried a different Fasttrak100 TX2 PCI card, with same results.
So, the bottom line is that this one drive just doesn't work right when
connected to the Fasttrak100 TX2 but is OK when connected to the mbrd
(nForce4) IDE-PATA connector. I don't understand this - how can that be?
AFAIK the Seagate diags only read from the drive so it would not appear to
be a signal cable/connector thing... how can the controller affect whether
the drive gets bad sector reads? I guess I should check full operation of
the drive on the mbrd IDE connection but dunno if I have the time or
motivation.
I'm going to get a new drive of course but... anybody with some wisdom
here?
have a K8 system (Athlon64 3500+ on a MSI K8N Neo4-F) which is used as a
File/Print/DNS server with a Promise Fasttrak100 TX2 PCI card swappable
RAID-1 set up. This was a hot-swappable RAID kit sold by Promise called a
Fasttrak100 TX2 Pro
http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail.asp?product_id=4 and it's
been working fine for 4-5 years now. I bought two complete kits so I'd
have four drawers and a spare controller.
On Saturday, one of the RAID array drives started dropping out of "ready",
triggering a rebuild, followed by repeating "drop-outs" and rebuilds... so
Sunday I trudged off to the office to err, fix it. We have four
identical Seagate UDMA-100 drives and one of the active pair gets swapped
once per week.
With the swappable drawers/enclosures etc. it took me a while to boil this
down to the "faulty part" but here's the essence of it: the drive which
failed to rebuild gives faulty sectors on every single sector with the
Seagate Seatools diagnostics when connected to the Promise Fasttrak100 TX2
PCI card; the same drive passes OK when connected to the motherboard
IDE-PATA connector.
This is with the same IDE cable -- tried with several 80-wire conductor
cables, including two fresh ones -- connecting the drive directly to the
IDE ports, i.e. without the enclosures. All the other three drives pass
diagnostics, and work fine in real use, when connected to the Fasttrak100
TX2; I also tried a different Fasttrak100 TX2 PCI card, with same results.
So, the bottom line is that this one drive just doesn't work right when
connected to the Fasttrak100 TX2 but is OK when connected to the mbrd
(nForce4) IDE-PATA connector. I don't understand this - how can that be?
AFAIK the Seagate diags only read from the drive so it would not appear to
be a signal cable/connector thing... how can the controller affect whether
the drive gets bad sector reads? I guess I should check full operation of
the drive on the mbrd IDE connection but dunno if I have the time or
motivation.
I'm going to get a new drive of course but... anybody with some wisdom
here?