Question : Problem: Diminishing Speed with RAID Controller

Bought and installed a Intel SRCU42e RAID Controller for use in a HP Proliant ML110 G4 along with three Hitachi 10K Ultrastar disks and a SCSI U320 ribbon cable, essentialy it was going to be a 2K3 NAS. It was installed and working for several weeks then the RAID array went offline for no apparant reason.

When it was first installed all three drives were detected at 320mb/sec, once the array went offline the disks were only being detected by the controller BIOS as 160mb/sec of the course of the last few weeks of debugging the problem the speed has dropped to 20mb/sec through 80mb/sec and 40mb/sec.

Each of the drives has been tested on its own with different cables but still registers at 20mb/sec (occasionaly 40mb/sec), unfortunatly I do not have any known working systems that I can test a U320 drive in.

On top of these problems if I try and upgrade the firmware on the controller, the flash software is unable to detect the RAID Controller, despite windows being capable of seeing it as a RAID Controller with a volume attached (albeit a slow volume).

Answer : Problem: Diminishing Speed with RAID Controller

RichardSlater,

You should be able to boot from a USB floppy to flash the card's BIOS.

Is the card set to self-terminate? If you don't have a terminator on both ends of the cable, this can cause problem?

It does look very much like a card issue.

InteraX