More fun with Adaptec: DPC, 4TB limit, 1.5TB seagates no good

A

alamone

Gawd
Joined
Sep 30, 2008
Messages
589
Just thought people might be interested in my adventures with the Adaptec 5 series card,
specifically the 51645. I've been talking a long time by e-mail to a tech support guy on
the Adaptec side regarding my consistent 30ms DPC latency spike issue which
happens on the storport driver. All he could tell me is it was some incompatibility
with my hardware, which I can't really believe, because the issue happened to me
on THREE different motherboards, a gigabyte X48-DQ6, an ASUS X58 P6T deluxe,
and a gigabyte matx-based AMD780 chipset. Basically, there is a periodic (30 mins or so)
30ms spike which causes audio to stutter, and it originates from storport.sys,
and only when the adaptec storport driver is installed. If you run DPCLAT.exe,
you can see it clearly, and if you run "xperf -on latency", and then "xperf -d trace.etl"
and "xperf trace.etl", you can zoom into the area and see the exact DPC call
if you have the debugging symbols loaded.

Adaptec provides an alternative SCSIPORT driver that doesn't seem to have
DPC issues, but that driver also has other issues.
I cannot under any circumstance create a raid array greater than 4TB, whereas
this was never a problem with the STORPORT driver.
It dies with some unknown error. Great. I was thinking about creating
multiple 4TB arrays and kludging them together with windows spanning, but
my past experiences with dynamic disks tend to dissuade me from that route.

And then, my seagate 1.5TBs, which are updated to the SD1A firmware,
do not work on the card. They get detected, you can convert them to JBODs,
but try to include them in a raidset and you get an error.
Adaptec says they're working on it and hoping to get a firmware fix,
but judging by the frequency of their driver updates I'm not holding my breath.

By the way, all of this is on the latest driver / BIOS, and I've tried
reverting to older versions as well.

So, the support guy offered an RMA, thinking perhaps it was faulty hardware.
I received the replacement card on Saturday and tried it - nope, exact same
problems. Just for kicks I tried putting both cards in the system, since
the P6T deluxe has 3 16x slots... and this time, I got two 30ms spikes,
one after another. Great...

I'm about ready to just give up and get an Areca, although
I hear their SAS based controller has some problems with SATA disks
(as does the Adaptec to be honest). Must be that intel IOP 348?
 
this is why i stopped buying adaptec stuff, drivers are iffy, dont always work, support blames it on you, driver support ends suddenly.
 
Don't just think adapatec is the only with with compatibility. Hence one of the big reasons why I just dumped raid and went WHS.
 
how reliable is WHS vs a real raid card.. they arent really the same, your OS takes a crap there goes your data?
 
Adaptec is just plain trash, has been for many many years. If you want compatibility, reliability and stability you need LSI, period. LSI powers almost all of my arrays, with Areca being the sole exception. Areca however, has both compatibility and stability problems.

If you want it done right, LSI is the only option. That's why IBM and just about everyone else OEMs or uses LSI in whole or in part.
 
MrGuvernment said:
how reliable is WHS vs a real raid card.. they arent really the same, your OS takes a crap there goes your data?
Click to expand...

No one said they were the same, they are an alternative option if you are like me or the many others who are tired of having compatibility problems.

Secondly, you dont lose your data on a OS failure.
 
Perhaps it is a firmware issue? Has it been updated to the most recent revisions?
 
Strange, I haven't had any issues with the Seagate 1.5TB drives on my Adaptec 31605; I have five of the disks in a RAID5 array for 5.25TB of storage, all addressable.

It could be an inter-design incompatability issue in that your 5x00 series cards seem to have that my 3x00 don't...my card is flashed to the b15728 firmware.
 
Firmware is latest (the one posted December 8, 2008) on the Adaptec site.
Driver is also latest, posted on the same date.
As I said, I tried reverting to older drivers to no avail.
Moreover, one of their older drivers didn't even have a digital signature on it
so I had to test-sign it and put windows into test mode to even use it.

If LSI or Areca are the recommendations, then what's the recommend card?
Megaraid SAS 8888-ELP: 8 ports, internal/external selectable, $500ish
Megaraid SAS 84106E: 16 ports, internal, $500ish
Areca ARC-1280ML: 24 ports, internal, SATA only, $1100ish

I don't have any experience with the LSI Logic cards but I've read some
reports that streaming reads/writes aren't very fast in RAID6. Comments?
I know they're popular in the enterprise but server apps typically need more
random access IOPs than streaming bandwidth.
 
Regarding the 3 vs the 5 series, Adaptec has stated that SATA compatibility is better on the 3 series, which may be why your Seagates are working fine on it. The 3 series has an IOP333 whereas the 5 series has an IOP348, which seems to be notorious for introducing SATA compatibility issues.
 
Syntax Error said:
Strange, I haven't had any issues with the Seagate 1.5TB drives on my Adaptec 31605; I have five of the disks in a RAID5 array for 5.25TB of storage, all addressable.
Click to expand...

Just to ask, but you don't have any DPC issues on your 3-series card?
E.g. if you just let DPCLAT.exe run idle for a few hours, when you come back,
there's no message that your drivers are behaving bad and you have
a maximum latency of about 30000us?

Edit: Also, have you tried installing any of the newer drivers available for the 5 series for your 3 series card? I saw the 3 series page, the driver development basically stopped a while ago. If I can get the scsiport driver working on the 3 series card, maybe i should just "downgrade" to a 3 series instead.
 
alamone said:
Just to ask, but you don't have any DPC issues on your 3-series card?
E.g. if you just let DPCLAT.exe run idle for a few hours, when you come back,
there's no message that your drivers are behaving bad and you have
a maximum latency of about 30000us?
Click to expand...
If this message is supposed to come up on Windows Explorer or within Adaptec Storage Manager, I can't say I've ever seen such a message before. I also don't notice any latency issues for my card at all as well.

alamone said:
Edit: Also, have you tried installing any of the newer drivers available for the 5 series for your 3 series card? I saw the 3 series page, the driver development basically stopped a while ago. If I can get the scsiport driver working on the 3 series card, maybe i should just "downgrade" to a 3 series instead.
Click to expand...
I installed the latest drivers that Adaptec put up on their website for the 3-series RAID cards; if those are supposed to be compatible with 5-series cards in any way that would just be unintentional and coincidental in my case.
 
No, it's a third party utility for checking for DPC issues on your PC.
DPCs are "Deferred Procedure Calls" and if they take too long to execute, they
preempt all other running processes, causing stuff that needs realtime servicing,
such as audio or video playback, to stutter.

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

Basically, the Adaptec is "behaving bad" and causing red spikes (30000us)
once every 30 minutes or so, which causes audio dropouts, video stuttering, etc.
Annoying as you might imagine.

So if you wouldn't mind, can you run that utility in the background for a few hours
and see if your "Absolute Maximum" doesn't exceed a large number like 2000 or so?
Thanks.
 
alamone said:
No, it's a third party utility for checking for DPC issues on your PC.
DPCs are "Deferred Procedure Calls" and if they take too long to execute, they
preempt all other running processes, causing stuff that needs realtime servicing,
such as audio or video playback, to stutter.

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

Basically, the Adaptec is "behaving bad" and causing red spikes (30000us)
once every 30 minutes or so, which causes audio dropouts, video stuttering, etc.
Annoying as you might imagine.

So if you wouldn't mind, can you run that utility in the background for a few hours
and see if your "Absolute Maximum" doesn't exceed a large number like 2000 or so?
Thanks.
Click to expand...
I'll check it out when I return from work tonight. :)
 
After monitoring my DPC latency for a few hours now, I can't really see anything that matches what you've described in latency or stuttering issues - and this is while I was streaming data from my array.

I hope you get your issue resolved. :(
 
Thanks for the info.

I've been talking to Adaptec support about it for a while and it seems like a dead end, so I think in the end I'll use the 5 series with the SCSIPORT driver, which limits me to 4TB per logical array. I'll just use it with SAS drives, which arent that big anyway. Maybe I'll pick up a 3 series card for the high capacity SATA drives, since it seems you dont have any problems with them and the 1.5tb seagates.
 
Ockie said:
No one said they were the same, they are an alternative option if you are like me or the many others who are tired of having compatibility problems.

Secondly, you dont lose your data on a OS failure.
Click to expand...

if your WHS craps out, it would "could" take your array with it, any configuration - gone.. i know you can repair the OS install or put the drive in another rig.. but if the OS has a say raid 5 configuration or raid 0 and the OS craps out... a repair may not "repair" the raid config and thus, your data is now in-accesible.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top