In a previous adventure I replaced an Adaptec HBA with an LSI SAS3 HBA, and the chassis drive bay LED’s stopped working. I suspect the LSI card does not play nice with the SGPIO sideband controller, and I decided to replace the chassis with one similar to my SC846 chassis, where the LSI card and drive bay LED’s do work fine. What should have been a simple replacement turned into quite a recovery operation. ...
This post started with a quick experiment, but after hardware incompatibilities forced me to swap SSD drives, and subsequently lose a data volume, it turned into a much bigger effort. My two Unraid servers have been running nonstop without any issues for many months, last I looked the uptime on v6.7.2 was around 240 days. We recently experienced an extended power failure, and I noticed 5 parity errors, on both servers, after the servers were restarted. ...
I previously blogged here and here on my research into finding power saving RAID controllers. I have been using LSI MegaRAID SAS 9280-4i4e controllers in my Windows 7 workstations and LSI MegaRAID SAS 9280-8e controllers in my Windows Server 2008 R2 servers. These controllers work great, my workstations go to sleep and wake up, and in workstations and servers drives spin down when not in use. I am testing a new set of workstation and server systems running Windows 8 and Server 2012, and using the “2nd generation” PCIe 3.0 based LSI RAID controllers. I’m using LSI MegaRAID SAS 9271-8i with CacheVault and LSI MegaRAID SAS 9286CV-8eCC controllers. ...
I was very intrigued when I found out about Storage Spaces and ReFS being introduced in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. But now that I’ve spent some time with it, I’m left disappointed, and I will not be trusting my precious data with either of these features, just yet. Microsoft publicly announced Storage Spaces and ReFS in early Windows 8 blog posts. Storage Spaces was of special interest to the Windows Home Server community in light of Microsoft first dropping support for Drive Extender in Windows Home Server 2011, and then completely dropping Windows Home Server, and replacing it with Windows Server 2012 Essentials. My personal interest was more geared towards expanding my home storage capacity in a cost effective and energy efficient way, without tying myself to proprietary hardware solutions. ...
I’ve previously posted about problems installing Windows 8 on SuperMicro machines, and that SuperMicro released a Beta BIOS that solved the install problems. I’ve since run into two more problems; the install hanging when booting off the LSI 2308 SAS controller, and a BSOD when using a Quadro 5000 video card (more on that in a later post). I have two SuperWorkstation machines, a 7047A-T using an X9DAi motherboard, and a 7047A-73 using an X9DA7 motherboard. ...
In my previous post I talked about Western Digital RE4-GP 2TB drive problems. In this post I present my test results for 2TB drives from Seagate and Hitachi. The test setup is the same as for the RE4-GP testing, except that I only tested 4 drives from each manufacturer. Unlike the enterprise class WD RE4-GP and Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 drives, the Seagate Barracuda LP drive is a desktop drive. The equivalent should have been a Seagate Constellation ES drive, but as far as I know the 2TB drives are not yet available. ...
In my previous two posts I described my research into the power saving features of various enterprise class RAID controllers. In this post I detail the results of my testing of the Western Digital RE4-GP enterprise class “green” drives when used with hardware RAID controllers from Adaptec, Areca, and LSI. To summarize, the RE4-GP drive fails with a variety of problems, Adaptec, Areca, and LSI acknowledge the problem and lay blame on WD, yet WD insists there are no known problems with the RE4-GP drives. ...
This post continues from my last post on power saving RAID controllers. It turns out the Adaptec 5 series controllers are not that workstation friendly. I was testing with Western Digital drives; 1TB Caviar Black WD1001FALS, 2TB Caviar Green WD20EADS, and 1TB RE3 WD1002FBYS. I also wanted to test with the new 2TB RE4-GP WD2002FYPS drives, but they are on backorder. I found that the Caviar Black WD1001FALS and Caviar Green WD20EADS drives were just dropping out of the array for no apparent reason, yet they were still listed in ASM as if nothing was wrong. ...