PERC 5/i RAID Card: Tips and Benchmarks - Page 151 - Overclock.net

stebie · 03-11-09

DuckieHo, I was wondering if you could add a note to your well-detailed OP regarding possible issues with warm boots when using the latest LSI firmware (card not recognised) on some systems, where reverting to 7.0.1-0051 or (supposedly) 7.0.1-0056 should resolve the issue.

stebie · 03-11-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by fadetoblack

so you think the issue is just that the driver isnt correctly detecting if read/write cache is enabled?

Yes, that's my opinion, but I would have someone more knowledgeable confirm it. Thinking about it, it may be possible the cache on the hard drives and not the controller is being used, but I have no idea to confirm, sorry

gigs · 03-12-09

Ok so it seems I have covered pins 5 (SMCLK) and 6 (SMDAT) on SIDE B Connector

as well as pins 5 (JTAG2) and 6 (JTAG3) on SIDE A Connector.

Please add a Rep - (minus) button to my account and feel free to spam it as I fail epic style. Cant believe I stuffed around with this for 15hrs+ and it was because of this !

fadetoblack · 03-12-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by stebie

That looks perfectly fine. I wish I had write speeds of 231 MB/s

If you were getting sub-20MB/s speeds, you would definitely have a problem.

well i was playing around with different configurations and here are the results. for each configuration i did:
a) time (dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile count=10240 bs=1M; sync)
b) hdparm -t /dev/sdb
c) dmesg | grep sdb | grep cache

write through, no read ahead
a) 10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 188.064 s, 57.1 MB/s
b) Timing buffered disk reads: 768 MB in 3.00 seconds = 255.94 MB/sec
c) [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, supports DPO and FUA
- now it states read cache is enabled after i disabled it in the perc bios?? write cache still disabled. im confused..

write back, no read ahead
a) 10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 46.7853 s, 230 MB/s
b) Timing buffered disk reads: 700 MB in 3.01 seconds = 232.93 MB/sec
c) [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

write back, read ahead
a) 10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 46.5153 s, 231 MB/s
b) Timing buffered disk reads: 606 MB in 3.01 seconds = 201.20 MB/sec
c) [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: disabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

write back, adaptive read ahead
a) 10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 47.095 s, 228 MB/s
b) Timing buffered disk reads: 621 MB in 3.00 seconds = 206.94 MB/sec
c) [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: disabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

so as you can see im getting some strange results opposite of what one would expect. best results seem to be with write back and no read ahead when the drivers seems to think read cache is enabled.

fritzman · 03-12-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by gigs

OMG are you serious? I am such a massive ****ing nub. Can anyone please confirm this?

Confirmed... just do the side with all the 'goodies' on. Leave the plain side of the card exposed.

gigs · 03-12-09

Ok well I'm home now and have tried with just pins 5 and 6 covered as well as no pins covered with the exact same issue

* am about to spaz out and throw this card through the wall

*

DJZeratul · 03-12-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by gigs

Fantastic thread, I have read through it twice. For research the second time.

Unfortunately I have spent over 15hrs trying to get perc 5/i running in my pc with no luck. This is my system:

i7 920 @ 4020 1.44vcor 24/7 HT ON | Gigabyte X58 Extreme | 6gb OCZ Gold 1600 @ 1640 | Geforce GTX295 | 4 x VelociRaptor 150Gb RAID 0 | Water Cooling | 30" Dell 3008WFP | 25884 3DMark 06

Anyways this card works perfectly in my HTPC but causes my i7 system to fail on boot not even posting most times and if it does post it just skips the perc 5 ctr-r screen. I have flashed mobo to beta bios's and 3 non beta bios's etc with no luck. I have flashed the card to LSI and Dell firmwares still no luck. Disabled card bios etc.

I have tried different pci-e slots (this board has 2x16 and 1 x8 slot).

Once i did get it to work was able to create the RAID 5 array and install Vista and fully initalise but on next boot the system failed to see the card again with hard or soft boot. Now no matter what tweaking I do I cannot get the system to boot with the perc 5 card.

Any ideas guys.

This is odd, my PERC 5/i does not require the tape methiod and I am running x58... the only thing i can think of is that theres something on the Gigabyte board thats causing the Dell firmware to not be loaded...

Every time a card's boot ROM starts it takes away from the memory a little bit... once there are too many Boot ROMs then the rest can fail to start properly. I know for a fact that the PERC 5/i ROM loads second to last for me, followed by a Pci-E x1 ESATA card I have for my external RAID case. I actually had to disable the Boot ROM for my Marvell SAS controller before the PERC AND the ESATA cards even showed up. Have you tried checking to see if there are any other unnecessary Boot ROM's loading at startup, such as Ethernet Boot ROMs or secondary SATA Boot Roms?

Also, are you using the Intel built in SATA ports in AHCI Mode or IDE mode?

gigs · 03-12-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by DJZeratul

This is odd, my PERC 5/i does not require the tape methiod and I am running x58... the only thing i can think of is that theres something on the Gigabyte board thats causing the Dell firmware to not be loaded...

Every time a card's boot ROM starts it takes away from the memory a little bit... once there are too many Boot ROMs then the rest can fail to start properly. I know for a fact that the PERC 5/i ROM loads second to last for me, followed by a Pci-E x1 ESATA card I have for my external RAID case. I actually had to disable the Boot ROM for my Marvell SAS controller before the PERC AND the ESATA cards even showed up. Have you tried checking to see if there are any other unnecessary Boot ROM's loading at startup, such as Ethernet Boot ROMs or secondary SATA Boot Roms?

Also, are you using the Intel built in SATA ports in AHCI Mode or IDE mode?

Thanks for the reply DJZeratul. I have the drives running in IDE mode and I have everything disabled on the mobo including both ethernet ports, firewire, the second raid controler and I have the ICH10R raid set to disabled. I have no other add in cards except for the GTX295.

I have reset bios several times and flashed several times with the same results. I have tried with ram @ 1600 and cpu at 4ghz as well as fail safe defaults (ram @ ~ 1000 and cpu @ 2.6ghz).

Im gonna go

on this cards ass soon!

DJZeratul · 03-12-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by gigs

Thanks for the reply DJZeratul. I have the drives running in IDE mode and I have everything disabled on the mobo including both ethernet ports, firewire, the second raid controler and I have the ICH10R raid set to disabled. I have no other add in cards except for the GTX295.

I have reset bios several times and flashed several times with the same results. I have tried with ram @ 1600 and cpu at 4ghz as well as fail safe defaults (ram @ ~ 1000 and cpu @ 2.6ghz).

Im gonna go

on this cards ass soon!

sorry to hear that gigs... if I remember correctly my last Gigabyte board (P45-DS3R) exhibited some strange behavior with one of my other RAID cards... A BIOS update fixed it though. I'm sorry to hear that you've done pretty much everything ytou can and its still not working properly.

Have you tried installing a temp copy of windows on a drive on the Intel chipset and seeing if the card is found by windows and the LSI MegaRaid manager can interact with the PERC on that board?

gigs · 03-12-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by DJZeratul

Have you tried installing a temp copy of windows on a drive on the Intel chipset and seeing if the card is found by windows and the LSI MegaRaid manager can interact with the PERC on that board?

yes, I cant even boot with the perc 5 most of the time it just boot loops even before any bios screen. When I can boot (maybe 1 in 20 trys) to Windows on e-sata drive, I dont ever get past the loading windows screen. This card / board combo is seriously weird.

03-12-09	#1503 (permalink)
gigs New to Overclock.net Join Date: Mar 2009 Posts: 9 Rep: 0 Unique Rep: 0 Trader Rating: 0	Ok so it seems I have covered pins 5 (SMCLK) and 6 (SMDAT) on SIDE B Connector as well as pins 5 (JTAG2) and 6 (JTAG3) on SIDE A Connector. Please add a Rep - (minus) button to my account and feel free to spam it as I fail epic style. Cant believe I stuffed around with this for 15hrs+ and it was because of this ! Last edited by gigs : 03-12-09 at 12:28 AM

		Overclock.net - Overclocking.net > Components > Hard Drives & Storage > RAID Controllers and Software
PERC 5/i RAID Card: Tips and Benchmarks

03-11-09	#1501 (permalink)
stebie PC Gamer Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 50 Rep: 3 Unique Rep: 3 Trader Rating: 0	DuckieHo, I was wondering if you could add a note to your well-detailed OP regarding possible issues with warm boots when using the latest LSI firmware (card not recognised) on some systems, where reverting to 7.0.1-0051 or (supposedly) 7.0.1-0056 should resolve the issue.

03-12-09	#1506 (permalink)
gigs New to Overclock.net Join Date: Mar 2009 Posts: 9 Rep: 0 Unique Rep: 0 Trader Rating: 0	Ok well I'm home now and have tried with just pins 5 and 6 covered as well as no pins covered with the exact same issue * am about to spaz out and throw this card through the wall *

Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 2 (0 members and 2 guests)