Perc 5/i Help

[maxar6]

I upgraded 3 of my older SAS hard drives in my poweredge 2900 to WD 2TB enterprise drives. I created a new raid 5 array for them and am able to see and use all of the storage in windows server 2012 r2. I am having a weird issue with it though. During heavy writes to that raid array the server will BSOD after 20-30 minutes. Also lots of tiny files writes seems to crash it as well. It does not appear that there is any issue with reading files causing BSOD.

The dump files says the issues is with megasas.sys which appears to be throwing a memory error of sorts. I can get a screenshot if you guys want it. If I am not mistaken I have the latest drivers and firmware for the raid card.

I was thinking maybe I have older firmware and drivers and I just dont know it. Could someone point me to the most recent version? Also has anyone had a similar issue?

[leadeater]

Try doing a firmware update, could be problem with the driver/firmware and such a newer OS than the card was originally manufactured for. The other issue, which I hope it's not, is that the memory on the RAID card is faulty which would explain the issue for writes and not reads.

 

Try changing the array properties to write-through cache and direct I/O. If the issue goes away then it sounds fairly likely that it is a memory issue, performance will suffer though. Do this after trying the firmware and drive update.

 

The third thing it could be is on a lot of older RAID cards you have to be at a new enough firmware to support 2TB+ disks.

[leadeater]

You can find firmware here: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/product-support/product/poweredge-2950/drivers

 

Latest firmware seems to be: 5.2.2-0072 ,A08 - 11 Dec 2013

[maxar6]

I checked to make sure that I am running the latest firmware and driver on the system and I am. There was a SAS backplane update but that would not run on Windows Server 2012 R2. 

 

As far as changing those settings for the RAID card, I wont be able to do that until Thursday because I am out of town at the moment. I will keep you posted if that fixes it or not when I get a chance to fix it.

 

If it is the RAID card not being compatible with the newer drives what kind of raid card could I pick up that would work with the backplane and the dell motherboard?

 

Thanks.