Adaptec 2400A update
I would like to update my driver in my CD-ROM (Adaptec). How do I do that please? George Rich 30 Lawrence Drive Short Hills, N.J. 07078 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Adaptec 2400A update
George Rich [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I would like to update my driver in my CD-ROM (Adaptec). How do I do that please? That depends on what you mean and why you want to. If you want to update the firmware in the drive itself, then you'll need to follow the manufacturer's instructions for that. ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Adaptec 2400A update
Jason Sopko was kind enough to send me this information in regards to my Adaptec 2400A issue... (this is being posted with his permission, of course) -Adam - Forwarded message from Jason Sopko [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 17:38:44 -0400 From: Jason Sopko [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Adaptec 2400A update To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] I saw your posting on the FreeBSD Questions list here: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2003-July/014524.html I might have a solution for you. I had a very similar problem happening to me, and I couldn't figure it out for the life of me. This sounds absurd, but the problem could be your hard disks. I worked with Adaptec to diagnose the problem, and eventually pinpointed the problem to be the Western Digital disks that I was using (there is now a Knowledge Base article on Adaptec's site because of this). I noticed by the serial numbers of your disks (output of raidutil) that you're also using Western Digital disks. Western Digital decided that it would be a good idea to implement new technology into their ATA disks to reduce noise (without telling anyone of couse). The side effect of this new technology is that it breaks compatibility with ATA RAID controllers, including the Adaptec 2400A. If you go to this URL: http://support.wdc.com/kb.asp and select 'Search Our Knowledgebase' and then search by 'Answer ID' for '913' you'll find the following: IMPORTANT: Information for customers using a RAID configuration. Question: Why do EIDE drives disappear from the IDE RAID array or system after a short period of error-free operation? Affected drives: - WD drives with capacities between 40GB 120GB - WD drives between 120GB and 200GB capacity with manufacturing date codes earlier than 3/25/03 Answer: Problem: WD EIDE drives are dropped from an IDE RAID array or system after several days or weeks of error-free operation. Solution: The problem is a result of a feature that reduces idle acoustic noise in desktop drives. This feature may cause a timeout likely (though not exclusively) in an IDE RAID environment. To disable the feature, you can run a simple Western Digital utility to turn off a single bit in the drive?s run-time configuration. Disabling of this feature will NOT impact normal system operations. No firmware or hardware changes are required. - IDE Upgrade Utility (Non-3Ware controller cards) For all configurations other than 3Ware controller cards, download the IDE Upgrade Utility for the Desktop PC. You'll find the same thing on Adaptec's Knowledge Base in Answer ID ''. I've found that it affected my 60GB Western Digital ATA disks. Unfortunately, their 'fix' did not work, but replacing the disks with 60GB IBM (Hitachi) ones did solve the problem. Personally, I'll never buy another Western Digital product again. I hope you find a solution to your problem, good luck. ///Jason - End forwarded message - ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Adaptec 2400A update
I also have an Adaptec 2400A RAID controller and have problems when my system seems to be having a lot of random hard disk accesses. I upgraded the cache on the card to 128MB of Adaptec's preffered memory in hopes that the issue would subside, but it did not. I changed the write cache from write back to write through to see if there might be an issue with that. I upgraded to the latest I2O and SMOR. None of these seemed to work. My System will actually freeze when: * transferring data from a cd/dvd to harddisk and performing compression. (happens to be when I get the most disk access) - probability of freezing goes up drastically when I do something else at the same time that is hard disk intensive. eg: backing up data off a dvd/cd portupgrade -via listening to mp3's streaming off of my localhost For a while I've thought that it could be my system over heating. But when my machine overheats it just powers off abruptly. The freezing during high activity `seems` unrelated to heat. [ these abrupt power offs seem to have subsided since I got new heat syncs and got my AC fixed at my apartment :-D (DUH) LOL ] [ I am in the process of switching to water cooled ... as it is known that athlons run hot.. ] Something else that appears to be out of place (but i'm not sure) is that d0b3t0d0 always has a max speed of 10MHz no matter what drive I place there while all the others have a max speed of 50MHz. I have been searching the groups and mail archives for almost a year now. I can only find posts with similar problems but no resolution. Your post appears to be closer to my problems than others. There seems to be a small handful of ppl who have mentioned this problem. Maybe a bad batch of cards went out? or... the problem isn't frequent enough for some ppl to attribute it to a real problem? Or it could be the driver... I have no idea. I remember having all sorts of problems when I oringally wanted to put an OS on this machine and I didn't have a stable install until I set the cache to write- through (which for some reason is recommended for OS installs). Then afterwards I set the cache back to write-back (which was recommended any other time). ( from docs I have read scattered in remote places ) It appears we are not alone in our issue with the 2400A. Way below is a moderately detailed description about my system and highly detailed description about my 2400A. if you managed to read through my ramblings. Thanks! I hope more people will come out and discuss more about the 2400A. Even those of you who have stable systems! I would definitley like to know what kind of hardware and software specs you have. (especially if FreeBSD-5.0 works better with this card due to UFS2 or device drivers or what not.. i really have no idea) Thanks! -Adam I run on: FreeBSD: 4.8-STABLE motherboard: IWILL MPX2 dual: Athlon 2100+ MP memory: 1G graphics card: Matrox MGA G550 AGP sound card: CMedia CMI8738 cd/dvd drive: PLEXTOR CD-R PX-320A raid card: ADAPTEC 2400A FW Rev. 3A0L With 128MB Cache, Raid 5, 4 X Western Digital 1200JB w/8MB Cache DMESG OUTPUT ON asr0 asr0: Adaptec Caching SCSI RAID mem 0xe000-0xe7ff irq 10 at device 5.0 on pci2 asr0: major=154 asr0: ADAPTEC 2400A FW Rev. 3A0L, 4 channel, 256 CCBs, Protocol I2O RAIDUTIL Version: 3.04 Date: 9/27/2000 FreeBSD CLI Configuration Utility Adaptec ENGINE Version: 3.04 Date: 9/27/2000 Adaptec FreeBSD SCSI Engine # b0 b1 b2 Controller Cache FWNVRAM Serial Status --- d0 -- -- -- ADAP2400A 112MB 3A0L ADPT 1.0 BB0E14220H4Optimal Physical View AddressType Manufacturer/Model Capacity Status --- d0b0t0d0 Disk Drive (DASD) WDC WD1200JB-75CRA0 114440MB Optimal d0b1t0d0 Disk Drive (DASD) WDC WD1200JB-75CRA0 114440MB Optimal d0b2t0d0 Disk Drive (DASD) WDC WD1200JB-75CRA0 114440MB Optimal d0b3t0d0 Disk Drive (DASD) WDC WD1200JB-00CRA1 114473MB Optimal Logical View Address Type Manufacturer/Model Capacity Status --- d0b0t0d0 RAID 5 (Redundant ADAPTEC RAID-5 343320MB Optimal d0b1t0d0 Disk Drive (DASD) WDC WD1200JB-75CRA0114440MB Optimal d0b2t0d0 Disk Drive (DASD) WDC WD1200JB-75CRA0114440MB Optimal d0b3t0d0 Disk Drive (DASD) WDC WD1200JB-00CRA1114473MB Optimal d0b0t0d0 Disk Drive (DASD) WDC WD1200JB-75CRA0114440MB Optimal AddressMax Speed Actual Rate / Width --- d0b0t0d0 50 MHz 100 MB/secwide d0b1t0d0 50 MHz 100 MB/secwide d0b2t0d0 50 MHz 100
Re: Adaptec 2400A update
On Thursday 31 July 2003 02:04 pm, Kung Foo Ham[p]?ster wrote: I also have an Adaptec 2400A RAID controller and have problems when my system seems to be having a lot of random hard disk accesses. That sucks. I've given up on that card. Running an HP netraid card no problems.Anyone want to buy an 2400A ? ;-) -- Matthew Bettinger System Administrator Champion Elevators, Inc. Houston, Texas 77061 713.640.8500 ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Adaptec 2400A update
--On 31 July 2003 14:04 -0500 Kung Foo Ham[p]?ster [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I also have an Adaptec 2400A RAID controller and have problems when my system seems to be having a lot of random hard disk accesses. Hi, We have a 2400A in a heavily loaded 'backup' machine at the office (i.e. lots of large IDE drives, storing backups from all the other machines until they're spooled to tape) - it's often gzip'ing and storing the data from several machines simultaneously, all across a 100Mbit LAN. We've never [touch wood] had any problems with it so far... For a while I've thought that it could be my system over heating. But when my machine overheats it just powers off abruptly. I'd be a bit concerned if any machine I'd been using, ever actually had to shut itself down for thermal reasons [unless it was, actually faulty]. Remember - weird things can happen before it gets to the 'critical' level set by the motherboard [unless it's been set really, really pessimistically in the BIOS]. I have been searching the groups and mail archives for almost a year now. I can only find posts with similar problems but no resolution. Your post appears to be closer to my problems than others. There seems to be a small handful of ppl who have mentioned this problem. I'll agree - I don't particularly like the 2400A - we have a bunch of 3ware controllers as well, which seem better supported in FreeBSD, and 3ware themselves seem to be more open-source/OS friendly, but we've never had any real problems with the 2400A. if you managed to read through my ramblings. Thanks! I hope more people will come out and discuss more about the 2400A. Even those of you who have stable systems! I would definitley like to know what kind of hardware and software specs you have. (especially if FreeBSD-5.0 works better with this card due to UFS2 or device drivers or what not.. i really have no idea) The hardware we have it on here is a lowly ASUS K7VML, running FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE w/784Mb of RAM. The CPU is an AMD Athlon 2000. I can post you it's dmesg output off list if that might be remotely helpful - but just to let you know, there is at least the odd 2400A based system out there running under heavy load :) Regards, -Karl ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Adaptec 2400A update
To summarize previous posts: my Adaptec 2400A RAID card, with 2 Maxtor 160GB drives (model 6Y160P0) in a RAID-1, corrupts data and produces kernel panics under heavy activity. This is under 4.8 (plain vanilla install), ECS L7VTA motherboard (KT400), 512MB RAM, one vr NIC (on motherboard), 1 dc NIC (PCI), 1 Matrox Millennium II PCI video card. The 2400A is supported by the asr driver that is built into the GENERIC kernel. After a lot of testing I have discovered some interesting things but I am not any closer to a solution. - I put an old spare drive on the motherboard's IDE bus, did a basic install and thrashed the heck out of it to rule out problems with CPU, RAM, and other non-RAID components. This worked great. The system will be nice and fast when I get it stable! :) - I then put the same spare on the RAID card -- not as part of any array, but as just a disk. I reinstalled 4.8 and thrashed it good -- cvsupping new source, buildworld, etc. No problems. (The RAID array was not in the system at all.) - Then I separately tested each of the Maxtor 160s as just a disk on the 2400A, first clobbering the RAID data. Each disk got a fresh 4.8 install and the same build/install world/kernel routine, plus some other big file operations that caused problems for the array -- like deleting /usr/obj/*. No problems! - I have also done every imaginable type of cable swap and wiggle. I am as sure as I can be that there are no gross hardware faults in this system. I am currently re-running Maxtor's utilities on the 160's but I don't expect to find any problems. Assuming the disks check out as good again I will have ruled out everything except some kind of bug or subtle hardware defect that ONLY effects RAID-1 -- and perhaps only with my hardware combination, as I know many others use this card with great success. Oh, I haven't tested RAID-0. I don't intend to use it, but I will make a striped array and see how it goes just for fun. I will also try a Linux or Windows install too, to try and determine if this is a FreeBSD-specific problem. Hmm, guess I don't have any questions for the list, but hopefully this post will show future Googlers with misbehaving 2400A's that they are not crazy. Cheers, Matt ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
