raptor revisionms do matter

P

P3N1X[H]

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 27, 2004
Messages
174
well i finally got to the bottom of it. as to why i was having such a terrible time with my system and my talon sata raid card and my two 74gb raptors...

dirtect from pacific digital(the ones who make the talon controller card)

Unfortunetly the revision does matter. The HD raptor as far as
performance goes in a SATA drive is the best drive on the market. We
are unaware of the A1 having faulty TCQ. However TCQ is handled
differently in revision A1 then in revision A0.

We have tested both the A0/A0 an A1/A1 with the Talon card. It is not
recommended to run two drives in a RAID that are different revisions.
There are small various in the TCQ properties which can lead to data
sync issues and drive errors.

Tech Support
Pacific Digital Corporation
(888) 999-0732
[email protected]
http://www.pacificdigital.com


and theres my problem staring me in the face, i have an A0 and an A1 revisioon in my rig, and its my problem...random bluescreens on boot, slower than expected drive speed etc.
so tonite on the way home from work im gonna hit the pcclub and pickup another 74gb raptor. and either way im gonna sell my spare one to a buddy.

So to all u raptor freaks if u raid em, make sure u have the same revisions.
 
why don't you get a new controller card .. it might be cheaper ,.....just a thought ... i don't know anything about your card ...

good luck
 
i cant, i spent like 50buzx on the card

its the only card out that supports the raptors TCQ features....and i went out last nite to COMPUSSR and they only had REV A2's nothing else. so im kinda ticked since i have an A0 /A1 config. i need to find someone who has an A1 rev since those are newer than the A0 and sell my old one....time to hit for sale/trade

the problem is only the way the implement TCQ i guess its handled a bit different between revisions so if ur using a controller that doesnt make use ot the TCQ then u should be fine

since $$ is tight im probably goin to go back to my old promise SATA controller. 2 port plus 1 IDE port on it. meh. its what im gonna have to do to get around this BS with windows constantly crashing and erroring out . or i could get a newer PCI SATA controller that supports TCQ...anybody know of one?.
 
these jackoffs!!


Thank you for contacting Western Digital Customer Service and Support.

The series of numbers and letters after the dash in your model number are for internal use only, and is considered proprietary information. We cannot guarantee what revision you will get if you create an RMA. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Sincerely,
Dallas L
Western Digital Service and Support
 
How do I tell what revision of Raptor I have? I just bought one dated Dec. 25, 2004.

Edit: err nvm, it's A1 - is there any difference in the revisions? Is A2 newest, and should I return this for one?
 
This information should be in the ANSWERS sticky. With how popular the Raptors are around here it really should.
 
Sorry, that report doesn't make sense.

Slightly different NCQ policies, when working at all correctly, cannot negatively influence the drives' behavior in a RAID setup.

Of course, WD doesn't have a brillant history of correct firmware, if one of them is broken that would be bad, but it would be no matter whether it is in a RAID or not.
 
then why does pacific digital, the ones who make the Talon Raid SATA controller, designed specifically to go with WD Raptors with TCQ say do not mix and match revisions of raptors, due to differences in the way TCQ is handled?

if the drives are to work as 1 and the 2 have slight differences in the way its handled. and 1 wants to do it 1 way the other another way. i dont know doesnt seem right to me either, but i can say from firsthand expereince, it will appear to work for awhile, a few days, a week maybe, then i get data corruption, windows wont boot. and when it does i gotta reboot my system several times untill i get into windows. then i also get random bluescreens driver irq not less or equal, scsiport.sys and lots of random bluesreens...all related to the disks, and the sata raid driver. as soon as i take my raid card out and put the drfives on a sata controller,(non raid, and non TCQ card) it works PERFECT!

right now my 2 raptors are sittin on my desk, i did an advance replacement RMA for the both of em. and im runnin on an 80gig seagate hdd now waitin for my replacements. then i should have 2 of the same revision and ill raid em up then ill get back as to how the performance is.
 
well i think its been figured out. has to do with IRQ cconflicts. as soon as i took my Audigy off the pci bus it worked perfect. so moved slots around and theyre each on their own irq now, whereas before the soundcard and the sata raid card were sharing an irq and having a conflict. seems now its ok, but my sustained reads should be a bit higher id have thought. whereas before in my raid i was getting 80 to 90 sustained now im gettin around 50 sustained...thats not too great is it? btw im using HDTACh to benc h my drives.

edit. its still giving a driver irq less or equap still, so i had to pull out my audigy completly and use the onboard nforce2 audio. :( anyhow ill see how it goes
 
you touch on a subject that I recently heard a bit more about and have more questions on. Is there some way that you can tell if your SATA card is sharing an IRQ with something else?
 
in the bios it tells me what device is in what pci slot and waht irq its using, i leave it at auto.

but SiSoftware Sandra Professional 2005 tells you. or if you goto your device manager, goto properties on said controller then goto resources, then under resource settings, at the bottom it tells you the IRQ there. Mine is 17. and yea its no problem without the Audigy 2, but even if they dont share irq, it will still give me that driver irq less or equal error, so i took the Audigy out for now and am using onboard sound. no problems yet...
 
P3N1X[H] said:
in the bios it tells me what device is in what pci slot and waht irq its using, i leave it at auto.

but SiSoftware Sandra Professional 2005 tells you. or if you goto your device manager, goto properties on said controller then goto resources, then under resource settings, at the bottom it tells you the IRQ there. Mine is 17. and yea its no problem without the Audigy 2, but even if they dont share irq, it will still give me that driver irq less or equal error, so i took the Audigy out for now and am using onboard sound. no problems yet...
Click to expand...

That IRQL not less than or equal too makes it sound far to similar to a simple IRQ conflict problem - i had the same on an Abit KG7R for 12 months moving crap about all over the place - however, If you actually look at the microsoft KB for that error, it says memory problems are a likely cause.

Having found that (after swapping everything out) , and run a memtest, it was actually a stick of ram that had 1 bit dodgy which once pulled, resolved the problem, never to be seen again.

Run a memtest overnight and see what happens.

Wolfsbane
 
sounds like something to check into. but 2 things...

i had a gig of kingston hyper-x memory, and it did it with that, and that memory was memtested over 24hours...(i went out with friends, not to return till a day later and i had left it testing) and it was all fine then

and more recently ive purchased 2 sticks of mushkin memory, i know new memory can be bad, but.....

its happened with either pair of memory, so i doubt the memory is it

like i said, as soon as i took out my audigy 2, problem GONE. so now im stuck with the onboard nforce 2 audio, which isnt really that bad.

perhaps some memory on the soundcard is bad? or something with the soundcard is bad? i dont know how likely that one is though
 
P3N1X[H] said:
sounds like something to check into. but 2 things...

i had a gig of kingston hyper-x memory, and it did it with that, and that memory was memtested over 24hours...(i went out with friends, not to return till a day later and i had left it testing) and it was all fine then

and more recently ive purchased 2 sticks of mushkin memory, i know new memory can be bad, but.....

its happened with either pair of memory, so i doubt the memory is it

like i said, as soon as i took out my audigy 2, problem GONE. so now im stuck with the onboard nforce 2 audio, which isnt really that bad.

perhaps some memory on the soundcard is bad? or something with the soundcard is bad? i dont know how likely that one is though
Click to expand...

Hmm, possibly not then. Still, it's worth checking again - you might be pushing your memory too hard if your overclocking it?

It's possible that now that you've moved stuff around in the PCI slots you've got some driver hang-overs from the other slots.

And sometimes its just easier to start again :/

Good luck with it!
 
nah im not pusing my memory hard at all. i had this memory http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820146355
its running at ddr400 2-2-2-5. no problemd there at all.

Think i should try another reinstall of windows? i dont mind much really. but one thing is im wondering is why my benches arent as fast as before. whereas before i had sustained reads of 90megs a sec mark, now im down to 55megs a sec mark...i think it has to do with my raid stripe, my cluster size i set to 64k. whereas before it was at 16k. would that make much difference in my benches? im sure it would....answers?

edit.
i also know raid has no rean benefit to the dekstop user and gaming. but which stripe size would be most efficient if im playing lots of battlefield 2?
 
so I bought the bullet and purchased another raptor so my mixed set of FLA0 and FLA2 drives wouldn't be a mixed set. And guess what I got... a freaking FLC0. sigh... i hope FLA2 and FLC0 are compatible in the talon raid set. Anyone know?
 
i didnt even know they had those revisions...

currently the ones i have at my house are two A1 and 2 A0, but the A0 are labeled differently, 32FLA0 and 00FLA0, but they work fine together

but as i said before i had an IRQ conflict so it wasnt the drives per se, just they wetent matching revisions. but iot all works fine, btw heres an email i received from pacific digital support.

A1 is the newer revision, however we found when running tests with our
card that A0/A0 would get better performance the A1/A1.

Also note that performance can be slightly affected by the PCI slot.
We
recommend using PCI slot 0 for the Talon card if possible.

Regaurding your IRQ conflict with the sound blaster card. You may be
able to resolve that my setting your PCI IRQs in your computer bios.

Tech Support
Pacific Digital Corporation
(888) 999-0732
[email protected]
http://www.pacificdigital.com


ill throw them another email and ask about this FLC0 revision. what happened to the B0 B1? and why do they say that the A1 revision is newer???

sdadept whats the manufactured date on your raptor???

when i got the new A1 and A0 from WD RMA, the dates were june 6th and june 8th on them. and i dont have any A2 or C revisions either...this is getting mucky
 
I would really apprecaite that. The manufacture date is like May 5th or something (it's in the machine now but I remember seeing it). So far it's doing ok although I did blue screen when I first tried to add the new drive into the array and rebuild. So far the drive is performing well with the talon raid 1 I've got setup but we'll see.
 
ok, email sent off to pacific digital asking about your revision and the 'new' C0 revision. ill come back here and post when i receive a reply
 
P3N1X[H] said:
then why does pacific digital, the ones who make the Talon Raid SATA controller, designed specifically to go with WD Raptors with TCQ say do not mix and match revisions of raptors, due to differences in the way TCQ is handled?
Click to expand...

I suspect this is due to differences in write barrier implementation and that they know one revision has broken write barriers and the other revision have working ones.

To make effective use of write barriers they probably can't efford to blacklist one drive but not the other on the same RAID as that would make their firmware a lot more complex.

I would be very curious to know more about this. Overall, this makes me prefer software RAID even more.
 
well that sheds some light on something....

anyhow, im still waiting on the response from PD from the email i sent out for ya yesterday. anybody else have mixmatching revisions? or better luck with different revisions? right now im using my A0 revisions and its workin fine, no BSOD or any BS with my soundcard, now that ive moved stuff around on the pci bus
 
well I'm going on over a week now with this running and so far so good. I haven't had anything drop out and the array has seemed solid.
 
does the nforce 4 utilize TCQ?

anyhow heres my response from PD sdadept

Pacific Digital developed the Talon ZL-150 in 2004. At that time there
were only A revisions of the WD Raptor. Unfortunetly there can be
multiple revisions to any hard drive and PDC continually testing new
drives with our product. The WD Raptor drive revisions are listed
below. Out of there we have found through running tests that A0/A0
gets
the best performance with our Talon Card, however we have made bios
updates available to be compatible with other drive revisions. Bios
update are available here:
http://www.pacificdigital.com/dl/pafiledb.php?action=category&id=19

A0, A1, A2 (2003-2004)
B0, B1, B2 (late 2004)
C0, C1, C2 (2005)

It is not recommended to mix two different drive revisions in a RAID.
And there for we would recommend either A0/A0 or A2/A2, but not A0/A2.

Tech Support
Pacific Digital Corporation
(888) 999-0732
[email protected]
http://www.pacificdigital.com
 
i don't think there are any C revisions. i just bought a raptor 74

maufacturing date is May ...

revision A2
 
there are C revisions, sdadept has one. get back to me on whats up with your drives too please
 
just an update on this. So far the C revision has been running in raid 1 with my A2 drive just fine for many months with the pacific digital talon raid card.

Have you gotten that reply back from pac digital yet with their take on this?
 
ok, so baiscally its this....first off this is a new acct.

i have the two A0 rev drives in my raid config and its fine. and i actually pinned it down to an irq conflict with my Audigy2, and the PD Talon card. but without the Audigy, i was still having drive problems, so yea the two A0 Rev are workin fine...funny thing though

i did an advance replacement rma thru WD, and i pulled a switch on em and send the other drives back so i had 2 A0 rev....just yesterday they caught up and i found out, apparently they charged my CC 183 for it, and never called to tell me, and i found out when my CC company sent me a bill, im like WTF... so basically its all ok now and i told em which drives i have and they credited it back, but no problems with my A0 Raid config
 
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