Tex! Help!! I bought a SCSI RAID card...

Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
edited February 2004 in Hardware
I went to another surplus place today. One of the things I bought was a SCSI RAID controller.

I had no idea what it was until I got it home, only that it resembled some of the Compaq things I've seen on ebay.

Well, I throw it in my ECS K7S5A (that system is the easiest one to get to), and fire it up. Turns out it's a Compaq 3200.

It's a full length 32-bit PCI card, it's got one of Compaq's RAM/Battery modules on it, and it's the single channel version of the 3200 (1 internal connector)

Is it any good?















What if I said I paid $5 for it? Any good now? :D

Comments

  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited February 2004
    Well, I've got it installed in the K7S5A again, and I went ahead and put my 2 10,000rpm disks on it. Set them up as 2 RAID 0 arrays (aka in JBOD, but the Compaq config. utility insisted on calling them single-drive RAID 0 arrays), and ran ATTO. I'm getting some... interesting... results.

    It's reading much faster than it was on the Adaptec; up to about 46MB/s on both drives.

    But, it's refusing to write faster than about 2MB/s.

    WTF? :wtf:

    I'll post the atto screenshots when I get a chance, but the drives are 10,000rpm IBM Ultrastars, one is a 36.7GB, the other 18.2. They've got 4MB buffers, and were made in 2001.
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited February 2004
    Ok, here's the atto.
    18.jpg 94.9K
    36.jpg 98.5K
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited February 2004
    :wtf:

    i'll start with the obvious:

    latest bios firmware and drivers?

    as a rule, when I get a new piece of <strike>junk</strike> equipment, I flash the bios to the latest just to make sure the card isn't about to die.....
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited February 2004
    drivers: yes. Technically the card probably isn't supported by XP, but it detected it fine, installed a MS driver for it, and was happy. I d/l'ed the latest driver from HP for 2k/2k3, and it installed fine.

    Firmware/BIOS: No idea. I'll have to try flashing it.
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited February 2004
    I couldnt ever get my compaq raid card to flash the bios without residing in a friggin compaq server. maybe your older card will be eaiser.

    make sure the device in the device manager has write caching enabled. But that looks really weird even for XP.

    Also try making the disk a "dynamic disk" and atto it again

    Tex
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