Trouble with SuperTrak SX6000, need advice

[TerryMathews]

Running it on an i875. Card has 128MB DIMM installed and I'm pulling my hair out. The card doesn't directly kill the computer, but after a random period of time, access to the array stops and I'm unable to read any data off of it, eventually crashing Windows. This has a side-effect that no information is available in the Error Log as the error can't be written into the log.

So far, I've tried both the new and old BIOS posted at Promise's site, as well as both driver versions. Next thing I'm going to try is a different DIMM, although I'm not sure if I own a 128MB DIMM anymore...

Anyone who has used this card before have any advice? It seems to do it when I'm moving a lot of data, which is what is making me think the DIMM is bad - moving lots of data would cause me to use the full capacity of the DIMM maybe there's something wrong with the logical "end" of its storage.

EDIT: Problem solved. Had to disable Tagged Queueing and Synchronous Transfers for both logical drives provided by the SuperTrak controller in the Device Manager in WinXP. YMMV, but I've tortured both drive sets on the controller for over two hours now with nary a hiccup.

 

[charlie21]

Throw the DIMM in an old system and run Memtest on it.

 

[BatmanNate]

I use this card on an 865 board with a 128 dimm and have had my share of tangles with it in the past. The biggest issue appears to stem from PCI slots. Some slots the card won't even boot in, others it will boot but not take priority to my SCSI card. You might try moving it around.

Since the card is so long, it's prone to warpage/bending if the cables are tight. Make sure it is resting evenly and is not under stress. Check all of your cables. Check your PSU's rail voltages to ensure that it keeps within .5 volts while all drives are accessing. Make sure the contacts on the card's PCI bus connector and DIMM slot are clean. Consider installing a small 386/486 fan on the i960 chip's heatsink if your system is stuffy inside. Hope this is of some help.

 

[TerryMathews]

Well, when it crashed this time, I moved the card down a slot and changed the DIMM out for a piece that I'm 90% sure is 100% good (It never gave me any trouble in another system, but you never know). In case anyone is wondering, the SuperTrak will in fact register a 256MB DIMM, contrary to its stated max of 128MB.

EDIT: Gotta say, I never expected this product to be so finnickey considering the other Promise products I've owned. This was a drop-in replacement for a system that was utilizing a FastTrak TX4000 without any problems. Of course, there was a full (clean) reinstall of WinXP to go along. I can't say I would recommend it to anyone.

 

[TerryMathews]

The DIMM and moving the slot its in didn't help. I've got some new IDE cables coming, I'm going to try replacing those.

My problems only started after I installed the second RAID. I've got 3 40GB HDs (RAID 5) as my boot partition, and 3 200GB HDs (RAID 5) as my storage. Computer worked fine when just boot was installed, but freezes solid now that I've installed storage.

If the new IDE cables don't fix anything, I think I'm going to reinstall my FastTrak TX4000 and just have the SuperTrak run storage. See if that fixes it.

I did finally manage to get an error reported in the Error Log.

The device, \Device\Scsi\Sptrak1, did not respond within the timeout period.
0000: 00100000 00660001 00000000 c0040009
0010: 50000101 00000000 00000000 00000000
0020: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
0030: 00000000 00000007

EDIT: Selected words instead of bytes, because the part of bytes that is supposed to display English words had nothing but periods and a few letters in it.

 

[TerryMathews]

Now I've found a setting that makes a difference. I turned off Tagged Queueing and Synchronous Transfers for both logical drives in Device Manager since those functions shouldn't really be implemented anyway considering they only apply to SCSI devices. Seems to be working much better.

EDIT: The 256MB makes things much smoother. I'm going to try and dig up a 512MB DIMM and see if the SuperTrak will recgonize it.

 

[MichaelD]

Hi Terry,

I've been lurking your thread...didn't say anything b/c I had nothing to offer. *checks pockets* I got nuthin'

You seem to be making some progress; apparently, those two cards aren't playing nicely in your rig.

I'm also finding out something similar. I've got a SCSI controller card and an IDE hardware RAID card in the same system.

According to Epox, the PCI slots they occupy do not share IRQs, but in Device Manager, the SCSI card shows up TWICE...and the second "version" of it shares an IRQ with the IDE card.

Go figure.

What I'm getting is a "slowdown" when jumping from controller to controller (i.e. "drive to drive") in Windows Explorer...sometimes about 10 seconds or so. :disgust: Thankfully, no hard-locks, but I feel your pain.

Good luck.

 

[TerryMathews]

Originally posted by: MichaelD
You seem to be making some progress; apparently, those two cards aren't playing nicely in your rig.

I'm also finding out something similar. I've got a SCSI controller card and an IDE hardware RAID card in the same system.

I think you're confused, my friend. The SuperTrak is a 6 port IDE RAID controller that presents itself to Windows as a SCSI controller. More precisely, an I20 Controller, but Windows isn't advanced enough to know the difference.

As far as your troubles, I have only two suggestions:
A) Disable Tagged Queueing and Synchronous Transfers. From what I understand, WinXP may not support these features as well as Win2k did. SCSI is marginally unsupported in WinXP.

B) If the SCSI card is not essential to your computer booting (IE you don't boot off it, system files aren't stored on it, etc), try tinkering/removing the driver and reinstalling to see if you can get the ghost version of the controller to disappear.