May 10, 201115 yr I have two controller cards in my setup with an X9SCL motherboard. On a cold boot, it intermittently gives me an error after spinning up the drives on the first card, "Initializing RAID component . ...." before timing out. If I interrupt this process, and reboot, then usually it goes onto to second card to spin up the other drives. I recently purchased some new Hitachi 5K3000 and WD EADS drives to replace some Seagate Barracudas, and experienced these init problems shortly afterwards. Shuffling the new drives on the second controller card has somewhat alleviated the problems but not completely eliminated it. Would appreciate any insight. Thanks!
May 10, 201115 yr You are not the first to mention similar odd behavior with this combo on this forum. Although one turned out to be a bad card. My board is in the mail, it will be a least a week before i install mine. I'll let you know if mine posts ok. did you check all your firmwares are up to date? maybe shoot an email to supermicro support? I'm sure they would want that combo to work.
May 10, 201115 yr Yep.. Had/Have the same issue as you do. See this post: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=12730.0 Check the serial numbers in the bios on both cards and see if their format matches each other. I contacted supermicro and they just wanted to RMA the card. I should get the replacement in a few days so I will let you know if it fixes the issue or not. I purchased my cards at the same time but from 2 different places (buy.com and newegg).
May 10, 201115 yr Author Yep.. Had/Have the same issue as you do. See this post: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=12730.0 Check the serial numbers in the bios on both cards and see if their format matches each other. I contacted supermicro and they just wanted to RMA the card. I should get the replacement in a few days so I will let you know if it fixes the issue or not. I purchased my cards at the same time but from 2 different places (buy.com and newegg). Ah, I should have looked at my search results a bit closer! I purchased both my cards from the same source (Provantage) and serial numbers are within a few numbers of eachother. Again, I don't think I noticed any problems with the boot from a fully populated server with essentially all Barracudas. It was only when I switched out some of the drives to the 2 TB that the problems started showing up. The "Initializing RAID component" only ever timed out on the first controller, not the second as illustrated in your post. Maybe it has to do with the position of the PCI slots? My first controller is in the PCI-E x4 on x8 slot, and the other is in the PCI-E x8 slot closest to the PSU. Both cards are only x4 so I don't see why that should be a problem. In any case, I'm interested in hearing your results as you have virtually the same build. BTW, firmware is a .21. On the FTP site, seems like .21 is the latest, although there are a second set of drivers in the SAS2 directory (though not sure these are for this card).
May 10, 201115 yr BTW, firmware is a .21. On the FTP site, seems like .21 is the latest, although there are a second set of drivers in the SAS2 directory (though not sure these are for this card). If you search this forum, you will find that a lot of people have downgraded the firmware from .21 to .15 and found it to be a lot more reliable and consistent - believed to be because the .21 firmware image is much larger.
May 10, 201115 yr If the cards shipped with .21 and you downgrade them to .15 how does that affect the warranty?
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