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TA-898: SATA HDD may not be detected when installed in expander enclosures

Products Affected
AXX6DRV3GEXP, MM# 877235
AXX4DRV3GEXP, MM# 877236

Description
In configurations where the expander enclosures listed above are used with a RAID controller and SATA drives, some hard-drives may not be detected by the RAID controller when performing a cold boot (powering the system up). After several minutes the undetected drives may light up the fault LEDs. After system reset or soft-reboot, all drives will be detected. If this issue occurs, the RAID arrays will be degraded or failed. Depending on the particular system configuration, the failure may never occur, may occur intermittently, or may occur on every cold boot.

Root Cause
At a certain point during the cold boot process, the expander firmware incorrectly reports the status of SATA drives that have not finished spinning up. This results in a communication failure between the RAID controller and the hard-drives.

Corrective Action / Resolution
The issue has been fixed in hot-swap controller firmware version 2.08. All customers using expander enclosures with SATA hard-drives are advised to update their hot-swap controller firmware to version 2.08 or later, which can be downloaded from here

icon  Technical Advisory 898 [PDF]
File Name: TA89801.pdf
Size: 37,003 bytes
Date: February 2008


Note: PDF Files require Adobe Acrobat* Reader*

This applies to:
IntelŪ Entry Server Chassis SC5299-E
IntelŪ RAID Controller SASMF8I
IntelŪ RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I
IntelŪ RAID Controller SRCSASJV
IntelŪ RAID Controller SRCSASLS4I
IntelŪ RAID Controller SRCSASRB
IntelŪ RAID Controller SRCSATAWB
IntelŪ Server Board S5000PSL
IntelŪ Server Board S5000VSA
IntelŪ Server Board S5000XSL
IntelŪ Server Chassis SC5400
IntelŪ Server System SC5400RA
IntelŪ Workstation Board S5000XVN

Solution ID: CS-028858
Date Created: 21-Feb-2008
Last Modified: 12-Nov-2009
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