Professional Geekism

I’m going to cry.

If you can remember back to my woes with SATA-II disks and 3Ware 9500S cards, you’ll probably be feeling my pain right about now.

The wonderful set of Western Digital RE2 drives, which saved the day all those months ago, now seem to be dropping out of the RAID5 array.

However, the biggest clue as to why, was provided by the following 3DM2 alert e-mail:

20080117061603 - Controller 0
ERROR - Drive timeout detected: port=0

Searching the 3Ware knowledge base for ‘WD timeout’ leads us to this KB article, concerning certain WD drives that inadvertantly drop-out of an array because of a fault in their ‘doze time’ implementation. Whether or not the firmware patches describe rid the drive of any ‘doze time’ altogether, or just tweak it for better compatibility is beyond me, but the corrected firmwares can be had from this download page on the Western Digital website.

So, I guess I’m going to UKS on monday to upgrade the firmware on four WD5000YS drives.

Update: As it turns out, the disk firmware was already up to date! Now I wish I’d known you could check the drive firmware in 3DM2 before I bothered connecting each drive to the on-board controller, booting up with an FDD and waiting to be told 4 times that the firmware was already current! Whoops

If anyone else comes across this, and they’re sure their drives are from the older firmware set, you would do well to upgrade your 9500S (or other 3Ware controller) firmware first. The latest release (at least for the 9500S) has an update that allows the WD firmware upgrade to transverse the 3Ware controller: so no need to meddle about with connecting disks to on-board controllers.

Anyway. The array has been fine since; no time-outs at all. As above, I upgraded the 3Ware card’s firmware by a few revisions, so hopefully that will sort the issue out. Guess we’ll just have to wait another 6 months to find out!