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 

	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:

Intel® Entry Server Chassis SC5299-E Intel® RAID Controller SASMF8I Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASJV Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASLS4I Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASRB Intel® RAID Controller SRCSATAWB Intel® Server Board S5000PSL Intel® Server Board S5000VSA Intel® Server Board S5000XSL Intel® Server Chassis SC5400 Intel® Server System SC5400RA Intel® Workstation Board S5000XVN