My troubles began about four years after their manufacture date: yes that’s a long time but most PCs can keep going and going.  Started to see hard drive issues: loss of data, problems booting, the normal kind of thing from a failing hard drive.  Except there were no SMART errors, no bad sectors, no write failures.  Re-imaging the PC is standard practice since we’re a large company and don’t have time to nitpick every error, but this only helped for a few days.

These dx2200 PCs all shipped with Windows XP Professional and there is no reason to move beyond that.  Thinking I/O problems I checked to driver updates and noticed an ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset was used: this was a standard two chip north bridge south bridge solution with integrated graphics.  The last chipset driver from HP was February 2007 and was the version I was using.  Dead end on the driver front so I turned back to physical testing.

The Western Digital WD800JD was installed in most dx2200s so I ran the BIOS SMART and extended hard drive tests but they came back clean.  I downloaded the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic CD and ran the short and extended tests.  On first run I received error code 0132 which according to WD means:

Command Aborted. Please ensure that you are using the version of diagnostic utility corresponding to either newer or older Western Digital drives.

I had the right version based on the information WD provides on the WD800JD page so that left me scratching my head.  On a whim I replaced the SATA cable: the error disappeared and the drive tested without issue.  I put the PC back into production and everything was working.  This was my first failed SATA cable and I was a bit skeptical.  Luckily I had more dx2200 PCs hanging around in the back room that had the same drive errors.

On the next PC I repeated the testing steps and again saw error code 0132 from the Western Digital diagnostics: this time I moved the SATA cable from slot 1 to slot 2 on the motherboard and the error went away and the drive tested with no errors.  For the third PC I simply shut the PC down after receiving the 0132 error and reseated the SATA cable in slot 1.  On power up and testing no errors.  Subsequent problems on other dx2200s were fixed by reseating the SATA cable.

I’m not sure why after prolonged use this motherboard has issues with it’s SATA connectors and needs the connection re-established; at least I know what to do when it happens.  As an aside removing the WD800JD and testing it in another PC showed no errors.

It’s a low end ATX server board supporting one P4 CPU, four DDR2 DIMMs, two 10/100/1000 NICs  and one PCI-X slot.  The CPU is a socket 775 supporting 90 nm CPUs with 800 MHz and 533 MHz bus speeds: mine came with a P4 3.2 GHz.  Maximum memory is 4 GB but in can be ECC or non ECC.  Only one PCI-X 64 bit 133 MHz slot but five PCI 32 bit 33 MHz slots.  A single PATA and floppy connector.  Also has support for an optional IPMI 2.0 adapter in the white SO-DIMM looking slot.

There are some standout features.  The layout is well organized; very sensible.  It has a ton of headers for LED indicators: one each for the two Gigabit ports and the four SATA ports.  The four SATA ports are parallel to the motherboard so the cables won’t get in the way.  The PCI-X slot is unobstructed and will take a full length card.  The area around the CPU socket is clear and will take any cooler you want to use; I’m using the Intel retail heatsink and it’s loud.  Motherboard power connections, 24 pin and four pin, run along the top of the board out of the way.

The last BIOS is from 2006 but it supports USB drives in floppy or hard drive emulation and allows an auto detect feature that chooses based on format: my FAT16 USB drive was emulated as a floppy while my FAT32 USB drive as a hard drive.  Nice!

Let’s look at the not so standout features.  There are five three pin fan headers: two at the top and three on the right side.  No four pin fan header for the CPU and none on the left side of the board for rear fans.  Maximum of 4 GB DDR2 memory support with 1 GB per slot.  I couldn’t get the two pin ATA LED header working; ended up using the first SATA LED header.

Finally let’s get into the bizarre; links are to Super Micro FAQs.  While the P8SCT has the Intel E7221 chipset with ICH6R south bridge the onboard RAID is not Intel but P8SCT uses an LSI ICH6R firmware that support Raid 0, 1, 10.  Intel Storage Matrix Manager can’t be used.  The SATA ports support AHCI in the BIOS but I couldn’t get Windows 2003 to install with either the included LSI drivers or Intel ICH6R drivers; I was forced to leave them in IDE mode.  Throughout the FAQs you’re let to driver packages with different names but they all end up to be the same: LSI MegaIDE RAID drivers that end with a blue screen of death when you add them as additional storage drivers via F6 during a Windows installation.

It’s a solid design and a good performer.

]]> http://tech.ebabble.net/super-micro-p8sct/feed 0 http://tech.ebabble.net/raidcore-bc4852 http://tech.ebabble.net/raidcore-bc4852#comments Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:30:16 +0000 Scott VanderPloeg http://www.ebabble.net/?page_id=227

The BC4000 RAID HBA family, comprised of 64-bit, PCI-X low-profile compliant controller cards, are the only 2U compatible SATA RAID controller cards available today. The product family provides both four-drive (BCM4452-H) or eight-drive (BCM4852-H) support and are based on Broadcom’s new BCM5770 Serial ATA controller chip. The new Broadcom BCM5770 SATA chip and the BC4000 controller card significantly boost reliability with efficient power consumption and thermal load balancing, and feature a MTBF (mean time between failures) of 3.5 million hours, which is nearly three times greater than that of competitive SATA RAID controller cards.

Enterprise-class RAID functionality for the BC4000 RAID HBAs is provided by Broadcom’s XelCore RAID software, based on proprietary Fulcrum architecture (a highly integrated storage architecture). These enterprise-class RAID features include:

• Online RAID level migration – the ability to change the RAID level of an array without taking a system offline
• Online capacity expansion – the ability to add storage to an array without taking a system offline
• Online array creation/deletion – the ability to add, modify or delete arrays without business interruption
• Controller spanning – the ability to create a very large array that spans up to 32 disks and achieves extremely high read/write performance using a large number of spindles in a single array
• Drive roaming – the ability to move drives between systems and controllers without keeping track of the controller and channel to which a drive was attached
• N-Way disk mirroring and hiding – the ability to create a secure backup of a data array while hiding it from the operating system
• Distributed sparing – the ability to use all disks in creating a spare as a means to achieve higher performance by using all disks in an array

The above encapsulates the features of the RAIDCore controller, as defined by Broadcom. RAIDCore is now part of the Broadcom family, but a new addition. I couldn’t find anything on the Broadcom site by means of navigation and search, so I went to the old www.raidcore.com URL and was redirected to the proper page. Read the above and check out the links to get a good understanding of this product group.

In an interesting turn of fate I was contacted by the RAIDCore PR rep months ago regarding the site, and I was quick to request a review unit. Unfortunately they were in the process of merging into Broadcom and switching over to the BCM5770 controller chips. Some time passed and I received my shiny new BC4852 SATA RAID controller, my first for a PCI-X 133 slot. I had to test in a 64 bit 66 MHz slot in my test configuration since that’s what I have and I can’t seem to get a deal on a new Opteron board and the new Xeon boards aren’t available yet.

Luckily I did wait on the card, since there were some issues with the RC4000 series controllers. Broadcom is offering a card replacement, so if you have an older RAIDCore card take advantage of this offer. Broadcom is also working to remove the “RAIDCore” name from the product, or so it seems.

Let’s jump to the chase and talk about performance, then take a step back and look at the card and it’s features and interface. Open our benchmarks and look for yourself: the BC4852 stands shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the pack. It leaps ahead in WinBench, and in Atto and HDTach writes. The only issue to show itself is a high CPU utilization, 11-25% depending on which benchmark you believe. This is because there is no onboard cache or XOR engine. They’re depending on your system having a reasonably fast CPU.

Looking at the BC4852 you’ll see a clean design. Without cache or a dedicated processor there’s room to spare. In the center is the BCM5770 controller chip, to the right six SATA connectors with two on the other side. On the left are eight pin headers for individual HDD LED connections, if you want to connect your drive cages that way. As well on the back of the card are eight small lights that flash as the array is utilized. It’s a low profile PCI adapter that comes with a PCI MD2 low profile bracket.

The key to the BC4852 is it’s rich feature set; just read the laundry list on the previous page. Let’s touch the highlights, most of which center around the ability to make changes to the array without bringing it down. The two biggies are RAID expansion and RAID migration; while the array is in use you can expand the capacity or change the RAID level. It’s not a quick process, but it works. Move from a RAID 10 array to a RAID 5; the only catch is that you can’t go to a smaller array, so no four disk RAID 5 to RAID 10 migrations. Add disks to your array and then expand it. Once you’re done expand the formatted partition with Microsoft’s diskpart utility.

Lots of other goodies as well. Up to four BC4852 cards can be used in one system, with arrays stretched across. Multiple arrays can all use the same hot spare drive, minimizing disk waste. The controller marks the drives, so they can be unplugged and reconnected in a different order without breaking the array. Staggered spin up allows each disk connected to spin up in order, so there’s not one power draw on boot up. Options abound, and all are well documented in the included PDF and HTML manual. This covers the entire spectrum of using and working with the BC4852 and should be an example for all manufacturers. It sounds geeky but it was a very enjoyable read, and provided all the information most would need regarding RAID. The drawback is a lack of printed material in the box.

Installation was smooth and straight forward. Creation and management can occur through the BIOS or via the RAIDConsole application. I used both without incident. The RAIDConsole is very easy: there’s one screen to work with, and right clicking on objects gives context options. It can also be run from the command line, but I didn’t try it. Inside the box was the controller, eight half meter SATA cables and a CD.

Once an array is created a full disk integrity is run, referred to as initialization. The array can be used immediately, but a performance hit obviously takes place with the initialization is occurring. Every option available can be performed from the RAIDConsole interface.

There has been a lot of talk about RAIDCore and availability since it’s initial launch last year. A where to buy page is available from Broadcom, and I checked PC Mall for pricing and availability: $385 US. That price puts it in the mid range of SATA RAID controllers.

Bottom line on the Broadcom RAIDCore BC4852: it’s a feature rich SATA RAID Controller that provides good performance. If your server is running a 1.5 GHz processor or higher then you won’t be hit too hard by the BC4852 using the host for XOR calculations. Each of use and feature set make it an excellent choice.

Editors note: this review was migrated from the old eBabble.net site and the photos updated. Originally published August 10th 2004.

Promise controllers and I are old friends, all the way back to their first ATA RAID controller. Their latest is the Promise FastTrak S150 SX4: a four port Serial ATA RAID controller. Looking at the image, you’re probably thinking you’ve seen it somewhere before: the S150 SX4 shares the same PCB layout and size as the SX4000. The only differences are the SATA connectors and the Marvell PATA to SATA converter chips. For a complete rambling on the Marvell chip check out our 3ware Escalade 8506-8 review.

This time around I didn’t get a retail package for review, but a review’s package. What should come in the box is the controller, SATA cables, installation manual, and drivers and management software on 3.5” floppy disk and CD-ROM. In case you’re wondering the review’s package came with the controller, photocopied manual, burned CD, reviewer’s guide and 128 MB DIMM. You’re not missing out on anything, and it’s a good thing I already had SATA cables.

Looking at the S150 SX4 board layout, it’s a match to the SX4000. The same single Promise PDC20621 ASIC to handle XOR ( RAID 5 parity calculations ) and the four ATA channels. What’s been added to the S150 SX4 are four Marvell 88i8030-TBC parallel to serial ATA converter chips. As well and I2C connector is in the top left, for those motherboards that support it for system monitoring. The only mention of it in the user manual is in the board layout. A very large board that in it’s next version will be about half that size. It’s interesting that the four status lights from the SX4000 have been dropped: since they weren’t documented it’s left a mystery.

Installation was very simple. I configured an array via the S150 SX4’s BIOS, called FastBuild. Entering Windows 2000 I was prompted for drivers, then a reboot and installation of the PAM utility.

Feature wise Promise has everything there you’ll need. It’s a 32 bit 66 MHz PCI controller capable of bursting 266 MB per second. It handles four SATA drives in configurations of RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD ( just a bunch of disks ). The manual and all configuration screens I encountered showed the S150 SX4 handling RAID 0+1 and not RAID 10, but the Promise website and it’s datasheet both list RAID 10. Check our RAID Types to see the difference. Promise calls it’s ability to recover from an error by drive hot swapping or hot replacing PerfectRAID, although all controllers support this. With Promise they would like you to use their Superswap 1100 enclosures. Cache is required for the controller to operate, and a user installed SDRAM DIMM of 64 – 256 MB must be installed. I found it funny that page 30 of the user manual shows an example of the BIOS configuration with a 512MB DIMM installed.

Management of the S150 SX4 is handled via the Promise Array Management, or PAM. This utility has been around for some time, but is updated for every generation of Promise cards. It’s very clean the menus follow a nice flow. IT has the usual features: array build, monitoring and SMART support, email and pager notification. It’s standout feature in my opinion is array expansion and conversion, covered on pages 67 -73 of the PAM user manual. This allows an array to be expanded by adding more disks, or converted to another RAID level. Some caveats of course, but it works and works well. I added a fourth disk to a RAID 5 array. It was time consuming but worthwhile. Once completed it’s best to use a partition management package to resize the partition and get the benefit of the extra space. This functionality screams out for a controller that can handle more than four drives: when will Promise match 3ware’s eight and twelve drive controllers?

Performance has been increased substantially to match the 3ware Escalade 8506, judging by our extensive benchmarks. While the previous Promise SX4000 trailed the 3ware Escalade 7500 across the board, now we see a neck and neck race. Promise pulls ahead of the competition in price: the FastTrak S150 SX4 can be found for almost half of the 3ware Escalade 8506-4, it’s direct competitor. Where it falls short is drive capacity and PCB size: let’s see some 12 port SATA controllers in a low profile PCI-X packaging. If four drives are all you need, the Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 is the SATA controller for you.

Editors note: this review was migrated from the old eBabble.net site and the photos updated. Originally published November 28th 2003.

A little searching gave me one choice for a card with what I was looking for, the Promise SATA300 TX4. To be fair there may be other cards available, but I’m a long time Promise fan (although it’s around $80 CDN). This is strictly a controller card, nothing fancy. It has four SATA ports, individual and aggregate LED headers and an SMBus connector for Promise enclosures only. In the center is the Promise controller chip, PDC40718-GP. It’s a low profile card that comes with the standard PCI slot cover and a low profile version in the box, along with four SATA cables and a semi generic CD that covers four different Promise SATA controllers. Like it’s competitors it’s 32 bit 66 MHz PCI; PCI-X 133 would have been nice.

Installation was dead easy; it’s a PCI card! I connected my drives and installed Windows Home Server beta 2. Loaded the drivers and then installed the Promise Disk Controller Management Utility. This gave a nice showing of drive information connected to the Promise SATA ports and provided exactly one option: enable or disable Native Command Queuing / Tagged Command Queuing. Check with your hard drive manufacturer to see if your drives support this feature; it intelligently arranges hard drive requests so they come off the spinning platters with as few drive head movements as possible, thus speeding up your drive reads. This really could have been added to the BIOS so you don’t have to fiddle with a one option utility, but I’m nitpicking here.

I thought about benchmarking but couldn’t see the point of it: this card is for people who want to add SATA ports with NCQ to a computer. Yes performance is important, and my day to day usage revealed no performance or compatibility issues. If you’re in the market for such a card, the Promise SATA300 TX4 is a solid choice.

Escalade® 8506 Series

• Supports up to 12 drives with a single PCI card enabling up to 3terabytes of storage (dependent on drive capacity , 2TB per array maximum)
• Supports ATA / 133 / 100 drives with a Parallel-to-Serial Drive Converter
• StorSwitch point-to-point non-blocking architecture
• PCI 2.2 compliant 64-bit / 66MHz bus master
• RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD support (2-port cotrollers support RAID 0,1 and JBOD)
• On-board processor to provide true hardware-based RAID
• Bootable array support for greater fault tolerance
• BIOS set up utility and 3ware Disk Manager (3DM) web-based management software
• Hot-swap and hot-spare capability
• Windows® and Linux® operating systems support

The Escalade 8506 series is 3ware’s second generation Serial ATA ( SATA ) RAID controller. Building from it’s previous generation, this series offers a 64 bit 66MHz PCI interface. On paper that’s about the only improvement over the 8500 series, but benchmarks and deep digging reveal otherwise.

The Escalade 7506 and 8506 series are 64 bit 66 MHz upgrades to their 7500 and 8500 series 64 bit 33 MHz predecessors. Check out our previous coverage of the Escalade 7500-8, and our extensive definitions of ATA RAID.

Serial ATA has really taken off the last year, mostly due to Intel adding native support in it’s 865 and 875 chipsets. Instead of worrying about master and slave settings, each SATA drive has it’s own connection via a slim cable. No jumper worries, small connectors and a slim long cable meant lots of new opportunities for system integrators. Manufacturers scrambled to create SATA products, including ATA RAID controller manufacturers 3ware, Promise, LSI Logic and Highpoint. A simple and easily employed solution was available from Marvell: the 88i8030 Serial ATA Bridge Chip. This translates Parallel ATA to Serial ATA and vice versa. Maxtor and Western Digital use them on their SATA hard drives, and the ATA RAID manufacturers mentioned above use them on their controllers. Take an existing product, add the Marvell 88i8030 and you’re in the SATA business.

For ATA RAID manufacturers this makes a lot of sense, since they can design a solution for Parallel ATA, then use the Marvell 88i8030 and have a Serial ATA solution.

Which brings us to the 3ware Escalade 8506-8. The XOR engine is the 3ware 200-0069-00 in the centre. The ATA controller chips are the same as the previous generation, the 200-0033-00, which can control four drives each. This time around two ISSI memory modules are onboard, maintaining 3ware’s pattern of 1.8 MB hardwired cache. The board layout is clean and relatively compact. The spots for the 12 port model can be seen on the PCB, saving 3ware some manufacturing costs.

3ware has two technologies for ATA RAID: StorSwitch and TwinStor. Here’s a quote from their FAQ, which is pretty self explanatory.

3ware’s StorSwitch replaces shared-bus architectures found in SCSI systems with a dedicated port for each drive, thus maximizing throughput and minimizing latency of the drive subsystem. 3ware’s TwinStor is a RAID level 1 technology that profiles disk drives and optimizes the algorithms for greater performance during reading and writing in a two-disk mirror. TwinStor is designed for applications that are read intensive, such as web serving which utilizes a mixture of small and large data sets with multimedia content.

Opening the box showed the controller, installation guide, software on 3.5” floppy disk and CD-ROM and eight SATA cables. Everything you need, except possibly SATA power adapters. They will run you a few dollars each, but may not be needed if your SATA hard drives also have molex power connections such as the Maxtor drives used for our testing.

I installed the controller, connected the drives and powered up the system. The BIOS setup hasn’t changed from the previous 7500 series, and for that matter doesn’t stray far from any ATA RAID controller. Select your drives and define your array. For RAID 0, 1 and 10 arrays the build time is instant. For RAID 5 arrays you now have a choice of having the array initialized, meaning the entire array is written to for verification, or you can go the instant route. Once into Windows 2000 the driver prompts were followed and the system was up and running after a reboot.

The 3ware Disk Management ( 3DM ) was installed: it’s HTML based and can be accessed from anywhere on your network. A very clean and easy to follow interface, it’s quite easy to use. We were fully installed and away to the races. Lots of nice management features, including email and pager notification. SMART status is displayed as well. When something goes wrong a message flashes on screen to alert the user, as I experienced when one of my drives went into power saving mode all on it’s own.

Let’s talk features. The Escalade 8506 is a 64 bit 66 MHz PCI controller capable of sending 512 MB per second across the PCI bus. It handles RAID levels 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD ( just a bunch of disks ). Who really spends $500 for JBOD? It supports hot swap and hot spare. Hot swap allows you to remove a failed drive and replace it while the system is running, provided you’re using a drive enclosure. I love drive enclosures but could never spend the money on them: crazy stuff. Hot spare allows you to have an extra drive connected to the controller, not part of the array, that can be added if a drive fails. Both scenarios have the controller rebuilding the array after a drive replacement in real time, so you lose performance but not uptime. All in all every ATA RAID controller should have these features, and most do.

Benchmarking was performed and compared against the Promise FastTrak S150 SX4. While the previous PATA benchmarks showed 3ware with a sizable lead, this time around things are evenly matched. The 8506-8 took most of the benchmarks, but by a very slim margin. 3ware trumps in two areas: 8 and 12 port cards, and a smaller form factor. Otherwise it’s a dead heat.

The 3ware Escalade 8506-8 is an excellent SATA RAID controller, capable of handling eight drives. If your needs lean to eight or twelve drives, 3ware is the way to go.

Editors note: this review was migrated from the old eBabble.net site and the photos updated.  Originally published November 28th 2003.

]]> http://tech.ebabble.net/3ware-escalade-8506-8/feed 1 http://tech.ebabble.net/istar-usa-bpu-230-sata-drive-cage http://tech.ebabble.net/istar-usa-bpu-230-sata-drive-cage#comments Fri, 29 Dec 2006 14:47:31 +0000 Scott VanderPloeg http://www.ebabble.net/istar-usa-bpu-230-sata-drive-cage/ Storage and ATA RAID are a few focuses here at eBabble, and a drive cage is particularly handy when you want quick access to installed hard drives. In a rack mount environment drive cages become a must, as fiddling with rack screws and hauling systems off a rack is hernia inducing. Let’s take a look at the BPU-320 from iStar USA, a company making its way into the North American market.

In the box is the drive cage, three 0.5 meter SATA cables, mounting screws and a open page manual. The BPU-230 occupies two 5.25″ drive bays and in that real estate puts three 3.5″ SATA drives. Each drive has it’s own quick release drive sled that pops open by pushing on the left side of the drive sled. Turning the circular “Lock” keeps the drive in place and avoids accidental bumping. Along the right side are: Reset, HD1-HD3, Fan. The three HD buttons are green when everything is working, then goes red when there is a temperature issue. A buzzer sounds as well to warn you: the reset button turns off the warnings.

On the back are the drive and power connections and some others. Starting from the top left are “Extension Function Jumpers” that let you connect the warnings out to something else; I’m just not sure what that would be. Below that is the temperature warning: it can be set to 55, 60 or 65 degrees Celsius. The fan takes most of the back, as cooling becomes important when you have three hard drives laying on top of each other in an enclosed space. It’s pretty loud when running full tilt but it needs to be pushing a lot of air. Next are two molex, two SATA power and three SATA drive connections. The drive cage gets enough power from two connections, whether they are molex or SATA (mixing works fine too). Nestled in there is the buzzer, which is quite loud.

Installation is straightforward, and the one page manual gives all the information you need. The construction is sturdy , with aluminum all around to try and dissipate the heat. The cables and screws come in bags inside the drive sleds, which perplexed me after opening the box, but playing the everything led me to their discovery. This is a nice little unit a those looking to increase their case’s storage space or want quick access to their drives should consider the iStar USA BPU-230 drive cage. I recommend it for server and rack implementations where noise is not an issue.

Editors note: this review was migrated from the old eBabble.net site and the photos updated.