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New to Intel Matrix Storage Mgr (used to Dell, HP, Adaptec). Issue with a SuperMicro (SuperWorkstation 5036T-T) which has an Intel X58 + ICH10R chipset. The box has (4) 250GB SATA 7200RPM drives in it with SBS2008 (64bit) loaded. As soon as we installed IMSM 8.9.0.1023, drives 1, 2, & 3 blink red (drive 0 is fine) and the system is EXTREMELY slow. IMSM shows the array and all 4 drives are OK...NOT rebuilding as the manual suggests if you see a blinking red light on a drive. We've done some research and it seems there's issues with 8.9 (/message/77527# 77527 http://communities.intel.com/message/77527). But since we're unfamiliar with IMSM, we're not sure if we should uninstall and put 8.8 on as the above link suggests...I don't think I'd be willing to risk 9.5 beta. And do we have to wait for it to rebuild (drives to stop blinking red)...if that ever actually happens? Or is there something else wrong here? Also, if we reboot and look in the RAID BIOS, it also shows array and drives are OK.
Thanks in advance,
Brian
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You might find that its just Initializing the Volume if you check in Advanced Mode of the Intel® Matrix Storage Console.
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Nope, I'm in advanced mode, and everything I can see says OK, normal, etc. Although speaking of Advanced/Basic, when in Basic mode is shows ports 0 & 1 are OK, but it doesn't show ports 2 & 3. Is "Ports 0 & 1" just a static image, so even if I had 6 drives in there it would still say 0 & 1, or should it also show 2 & 3? But advanced mode does show all 4 drives (0 thru 3) and all listed as normal as well as the array.
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Best thing you can do is install 8.8 then no need to uninstall 8.9 to do that.
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OK, put 8.8 as you and others suggested. Told it to do a rebuild, said it would take 16 hours. When it finally finished, all 4 HD's were solid green! Figured I'd reboot it to make sure. Sure enough, drives 1,2,3 were blinking red again! And still IMSM says everything is fine!
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Don't rule out hardware problems as that is likely your problem.
Update the BIOS, change the PSU even move the array to another (ICH10R or higher) motherboard.
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Nope...at least I highly doubt it. I forgot to mention that we have 2 boxes like this, bought a couple weeks apart, configured identically though.
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I think it must be a software issue, as a colleague of mine who is building another server (with the same config) says everything was fine (no red light, disk perf was fine) until he loaded the Intel MSM. And he even tried 8.8. And since I had a good backup of this server, I even tried 9.5.0.1037 and 9.5.4.001, and although the rebuild time goes from 16 hours to 3 hours (from 8.8/9 to 9.5.x), there's still a big performance hit. I even did some disk perf tests, and as you can see the tests after the rebuild are better, but not great. Comparing the General HD tests, the Disk Mark and Sequential Read is good after a reboot, but a bit better after a rebuild. Sequential Write is horrendous on both, but slightly better after rebuild. And Random Seek is bad on both, but slightly better before a Rebuild. And when doing a 'file server' test (which I haven't attached) which uses a 512MB test file, the speed is 1MB faster before a rebuild (5.7MB/Sec opposed to 4.7MB/Sec).
And I'm doing these tests remotely, so I can't tell if the red lights are still blinking after the rebuild/verify. But on the other box with 8.8, after doing the rebuild of 16 hours, all lights are green. Then as soon as it gets rebooted, they blink red again. I'm going to have him run the same disk tests on the other box to compare the results.
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I figured I'd also include a snapshot of the RST console. The first time I did verify it with 9.5, it did come back with one verification error, but hasn't since. And I know I don't have write-back cache on, but I usually don't unless I'm using a dedicated controller with a battery backup (even though is is plugged into a UPS).
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OK, my colleague reloaded his server, Intel RAID was picked up by Windows 2008 DVD, loaded Intel 6.2.0.1019 (which says ICH8/ICH9, not the 10R which we have), and no red lights. Had him run the same disk perf. tests, and MUCH faster. Disk Mark is over 1,000, Seq. Read is 280, Seq. Write & Random Seek are way up there (can't remember). Doing the 512MB file server test comes back with over 12MB/sec...opposed to 5MB.
What the hell?!
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