Adaptec - ASR 71605 16 drive card - 2 apparently dead ones received in a row, am I alone in this ?

[cyrus]

Had some troubles in upgrading my server from a very dependable 8 drive LSI card to an Adaptec ASR-71605 16 drive card,

had two of these cards from two different ebay sellers and both failed to be seen on the PCIe bus on 3 different machines whatsoever - appropriate cooling was applied and boot settings checked somewhat carefully. At no point did either present a Ctrl + A pre boot menu for card configuration or show themselves to any OS. Other folks having problems with duff used Adaptecs arriving as well ? or is there some daft configuration option I might have overlooked.

 

Anyone had such troubles with them ?

 

Limited to one PCIe slot for my server as i built the whole lot into an iTX brick, so kind of stuck with 16-24 port cards in expanding my array.

With Thanks.

[debit lagos]

@cyrus Did you ever figure out what the problem was?

[Uncle09]

same to me. 3 cards with different layouts ordered via amazon. (6 SATA, 12 SATA, 16SATA Ports)

All 3 are not working with the W480 Vision W Mainboard. Even the Hex counter does not start.

Removing the cards the board boots as normal.

 

Any idea why ?

 

[cyrus]

After trying a few different sellers and returning bricked ones I found a reliable seller in the UK that properly vets their cards.

The issue is down to the absolute requirement of forced air cooling, it seems that some of the cards that get decommissioned in to used stock suffered from overheating in service due I assume to air flow issues (the card pulls 15w constantly), also a secondary failure is that adaptec uses a glue based thermal compound and sometimes the bare chip die can be cracked during handling. After I informed the seller of the issues I was having he sent me one which had its heatsink compound come loose of its own accord and had repasted it, which leaves the later option of using an oversize heatsink as possible. Though if intact all will be fine, just handle the heatsink with care.

 

On instillation a *High quality* 60mm fan of 25mm thickness was carefully cable tied in place directly over the heatsink and it is run via pwm such that it tracks overall case temperature, it is possible to keep the card cool under normal conditions with virtually silent airflow, though given I have a working card with a loose heatsink I will later carefully convert this to passive capable heatsink cooling.

 

Somethings of note on immediately picking up that a card is operating normally: the heartbeat light will blink on and off, the string of red bus status lights will go thru a right dance in bootup and operation and the card bios screen will show on booting, if this is not seen, the card is probably a paperweight.

 

Experience on receiving a working card has been excellent these past 7 months ago, absolutely reliable, very fast and simple(ish) to configure; so as an option for compact builds I can now recommend them with the above caution applied.

 

The seller I bought from who was amazingly helpful is 'network-servers' on ebay, so consider them if able to buy from UK.

And of course, make sure you have the right type of cables for connecting to your drives, I had a lsi card sold and flashed in China specifically for unraid use arrive with the wrong cables once !

 

Cheers.

[SteveA52]

One note: if the BIOS in your computer is set to UEFI boot, then the "Control-A" menu will **NOT** appear during boot.  You will need to activate your BIOS settings (DEL or F2 or whatever your machine uses) and find where the BIOS puts UEFI extensions.  In my case, it is under "Advanced", then scroll to the bottom to find an entry for Adaptec RAID.  I have 2 of these cards and they work fine for me.  A third is on the way.