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?
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?