Dear everyone,

I'm having fun with some old hardware, I'm stress-testing an old
Adaptec RAID controller with a large number of disk drives etc. While
I'm at it, I've discovered an interesting incompatibility.

Related hardware:

Adaptec 3210 (I2O RAID, IOP303 + AIC7899 U160)
Seagate ST373455LC (73 GB, U320, 15k RPM)

The DPT/I2O BIOS always reports the disk negotiated as narrow/async/
3MBps. The disk is mounted in a hot-swap drawer in a 6bay SCA
enclosure, together with five other disks (various Seagate and
Fujitsu) - all the other disks are detected properly as U320. The
culprit disk is misdetected in this way no matter what, regardless of
which bay I put it into. At the same time, if I remove the Adaptec
RAID an plug the cable into a plain U320 HBA, the culprit disk drive
is detected properly as U320, no matter which bay I put it into, and
runs just fine under Linux (~130 MBps sequential read/write) without a
hint of SCSI-related problems.

My idea is, that this is not likely an electric/impedance problem on
the SCSI bus. Rather, it seems to be an incompatibility between the
firmwares of the two devices.

Neither Adaptec nor Seagate have an e-mail contact to their
tech.support on their web, and their FAQ's are not much use. Adaptec
does have a slightly fresher firmware (from sometime in 2001) on its
web, but it's labeled as ASR-2110 (not 3210), and there's no "release
note" about the bugs it fixes. I'm somewhat reluctant to flash that. I
don't like this sort of "blind flashing" and this is not a pressing
issue at the moment...

I know the ASR-3210 is nowadays hopelessly out of date, hardly
supported anymore. The obvious solution is to use a 2120 or a 2130 for
the single bus that I have :-) But still, any ideas are welcome.

Frank Rysanek

Frantisek.Rysanek@post.cz wrote in
news:1757090c-ad35-46e8-9edc-e9cc5efe8a3c@s12g2000prg.googlegroups.com
How exactly does an U160 controller detect an U320 disk as U320?

Did you try different setup parameters in the setup utility.
Is there a setting for Domain Validation (or whatever DPT called it).
If so, disable it.

You could check by removing all other drives.

You can probably ignore that. It appears universal.

Internally it mentions
3110F 3410S 3210S and 2110S
ADAPTEC 3000S
ADAPTEC 2100S
ADAPTEC 2400A
ADAPTEC 3210S
ADAPTEC 2005S

It also anounces as: "Adaptec RAID Setup Utility V1.12/66I 9/4/2001"
No model fixing.

It's found under 3210s support, you should be save.

If that's even possible:
"The selected file %s is not a %s flash image for this type of adapter"

What support would it need now that it didn't when it was younger?

Dear Mr. Rienstra,

thanks a lot for your response :-)

On 10 Led, 16:49, "Folkert Rienstra" <see_reply...@myweb.nl> wrote:
Detected as U320 on an AIC7902 plain HBA.

Tab key again. I'll try again.




BTW, I seem to recall trying to flash a ZCR-2005 firmware into a
ZCR-2015 card.
It did work out after a change in the filename I believe. That was
some five
years ago...

today's drives?
Just a guess, anyway :-)
I really meant to say that hardly any vendor will help you with
hardware that
you've purchased 10 years ago (in terms of newly written software
updates),
and that's definitely reasonable.

After some more testing, I have to say that in general it seems that
the I2O firmware copes pretty well with today's drives.

Frank Rysanek

On 13 Led, 02:43, Frantisek.Rysa...@post.cz wrote:
It does not solve the compatibility issue with the Cheetah drive.

Frank Rysanek

Frantisek.Rysanek@post.cz wrote in
news:202371db-2487-46d2-a1f0-77a1177e4d3a@k39g2000hsf.googlegroups.com
Btw, there was an I2O BIOS on the site that was newer than the one
contained in that 'firmware' package. It too has the Storage Manager.

Then it's up to Seagate to solve the problem.
If other U320 drives don't have the problem then neither should theirs.
Perhaps this is reason enough to return it/exchange it for something else?