IT Stumpers: 3Ware 9650SE + Seagate Hard Drives = ?
With over 23 years of experience in IT Consulting for the New York City area, we rarely get stumped. Though no two situations are ever alike, chances are we’ve already been through a similar situation and have a good idea on how to solve a problem.
But every now and again there comes along a problem that really has a unique answer to it. Here at Tech Alliance we call these problems “IT Stumpers”.
Below is an IT Stumper our IT Guru Michael Hernandez came across. It’s concerning a hard drive system that was not properly configured to be used to its full potential.
This one even had the tech vendor stumped! Enjoy.
I recently worked with a client who had 16 Seagate brand hard drives and 2 3Ware 9650SE RAID cards. It seems that the configuration that was done initially did not make use of the RAID cards, and the client decided that since he owned the cards that he might as well use them, especially since they were already installed. I expected this to be easy – I’ve done RAID array setup a million times before, the hardest part is usually deciding how to use the disk space after it’s ready. As you may have guessed by now, it was far from easy!
It started simply enough, I rebooted the machine and entered the RAID card BIOS setup, set up a RAID 5 array on the first card and let it initialize. No issues whatsoever, as I expected. Things got interesting with the second card, however. I selected the 8 drives that were connected and opted for RAID 5. The card started to initialize the array, but failed and told me there was no response from the firmware. Odd. The drives were known-working, they were just in use moments ago (albeit not as part of a RAID array.) Since the other card was working, I thought the card might be failing and so I called the server vendor (I’m not naming the server vendor here because we’re not in the business of slander…) – the support staff at this particular vendor was not great. The tech seemed to just agree with whatever I said (ever been “yessed to death”?) and in the end, shipped us a new RAID card.
A week later, I installed the new RAID card and the same problem happened. Now I was beginning to get angry. I called support again, and this time the tech seemed to be even less informed! We agreed that I should try upgrading the RAID card firmware, but the tech couldn’t tell me how to go about doing it. While he had me on hold, I searched on my smart phone and found the answer. Very frustrated already, but happy to have found what I hoped would be the solution, I hung up on the tech and proceeded to update the 3Ware card firmware (this actually took a while because 3Ware requires DOS to update the firmware, and this was a Linux server.) Eventually, I got the firmware upgraded, and the problem persisted!
At this point I was perplexed. I searched again, this time adding Seagate to my search terms. Voila! The first result was a post from 3Ware saying there was a problem with the 9650SE cards and certain versions of the Seagate HD firmware! I downloaded the (linux based!) seagate HD firmware upgrade software, and after a few clicks, all the drives had new firmware. After a reboot, everything worked fine!
That was the only time I’ve ever had to upgrade the firmware on a hard drive. Thanks to Seagate for a great, easy to use, linux based firmware upgrade utility!
