Re: [OT] RAID controllers blocking one another?

On Jan 17, 2008 6:23 PM, Greg Smith <gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com> wrote:

> On Thu, 17 Jan 2008, Scott Marlowe wrote:
>
> > On Jan 17, 2008 2:17 PM, Sean Davis <sdavis2(at)mail(dot)nih(dot)gov> wrote:
> >> two3-ware cards, one 9640SE-24 and one 9640SE-16
> > Sounds like they're sharing something they shouldn't be. I'm not real
> > familiar with PCI-express. Aren't those the ones that use up to 16
> > channels for I/O? Can you divide it to 8 and 8 for each PCI-express
> > slot in the BIOS maybe, or something like that?
>
> I can't find the 9640SE-24/16 anywhere, but presuming these are similar to
> (or are actually) the 9650SE cards then each of them is using 8 lanes of
> the 16 available. I'd need to know the exact motherboard or system to
> even have a clue what the options are for adjusting the BIOS and whether
> they are shared or independant.
>
> But I haven't seen one where there's any real ability to adjust how the
> I/O is partitioned beyond adjusting what slot you plug things into so
> that's probably a dead end anyway. Given the original symptoms, one thing
> I would be suspicious of though is whether there's some sort of IRQ
> conflict going on. Sadly we still haven't left that kind of junk behind
> even on current PC motherboards.

Thanks, Greg. After a little digging, 3-ware suggested moving one of the
cards, also. We will probably give that a try. I'll also look into the
bios, but since the machine is running as a fileserver, there is precious
little time for downtime tinkering. FYI, here are the specs on the server.

http://www.thinkmate.com/System/8U_Dual_Xeon_i2SS40-8U_Storage_Server

Sean