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Raid Controler Crashes system

H

hardware56

n00b
Joined
Jan 21, 2007
Messages
1
Hi! I'm new to this forum. I'm hoping some of you experts can help me.

I recently built a dual Opteron workstation for PhotoShop use.

Tyan K8W(S2885) mobo,
2 Opteron 252 (single core), 2.6Ghz
4GB PC3200 ECC REG ram,
ATI X1650 Video,
2 Maxtor 320 GB SATA2 HDs on the built in SIL 3114 SATA controler
Antec Truepower 550Watt PS

I'm dual booting Win XP Pro x32 and x64. I save x64 mostly for PhotoShop use because it runs so great on x64. My plan was to have 4 WD5000YS 500GB Sata2 drives on a raid controler in slot2, which is a PCI-X 64bit 133mhz slot, running Raid 10 to store all my data.
I need to store mostly photo scans of 70 to 140 Mb. After much research I bought a 3Ware9550SX-LP4 Raid card. When i first set it up it worked great and i was very happy with the benchmarks I was getting. But as soon as I started writing data to it it would crash after the first 2 GB or so of a 10 GB directory transfer. The mouse would be come slower and slower to respond, then stop. The file transfer would continue but usually stop when it got to around 5 or 6 Gb. Then I would have to reboot and all would be fine until I tried another file transfer. It seems to read ok, just won't write more than a GB or 2. As long as I kept the transfers under that it would be fine. After a day the raidcard stopped responding and would not initialize. I returned it and the 2nd card seemed much better. But it is doing the same thing. I have been back and forth with 3ware tech support for weeks and they don't seem to have any idea what the problem could be. This 2nd card is not displaying any error messages when it crashes. (The first one had lots of errors--it was clearly bad,)

In desperation I bought a whole different type of Raid controler, a Raidcore BC4552D. I have initialized it and let it run for 12 hrs while it set up, Then activated in windows disc manager and partitioned it into 2 partitions as before. When I did my first transfer, I found I still have exactly the same problem as the other controler! Then it stopped responding to the keyboard even in the bios screen on reboots. I removed the card and everything is back to normal.

The computer seems to work great as long as there is no raid card installed. Large file transfers to my other drives are fine and it is very stable.

I have write cache enabled, NCQ disabled. I have tried all kinds of different settings and none seem to make any difference.

Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks
 
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