win2k, XP, Fibre channel and drive indexing

[ncogneto]

Ok I was not quite sure where to put this so forgive me if I am posting in the wrong forum. First a little detail as to what I am trying to do.

I have built a 7 drive ( soon to be eight ) FC-AL Jbod with 4 9.1 gig 10k drives, 2 36.7 gig 10k 73lp series drives, and one 36.7 10k drive with 16 meg of cache. All were bought relatively cheap with the 9.1 gig drives costing a mere 15 bucks a piece, and the other three in the 120 dollar neighborhood. the neccesary t-cards were bought from HEREThe hard drives are in the following config, the 4 9 giggers are software striped together, the two lps again are software striped, and the 36.7 gig drive exists as a single basic disk. Together this setup is connected via a qlogic 2100 series hba ( $50.00 ). All sits and exists just find and dandy with some pretty impressive benchmarks on one machine. Now here is were it gets tricky. Fibre channel is a dual arbirtrated loop. This means I can run off the "b" channel the same group of disks to another machine which I have done. Now the drives are local drives on each machine. So far so good, everything aok. The config is below:

Machine 1
drive c 20 gig IDE (OS)
drive d 36 gig FC-AL ( 4x9.1) RAID O
drive e 72 gig FC-AL (36.7 x 2) RAID O
drive f 36.7 gig FC-AL ( OS of machine 2)

Machine 2
drive C 36.7 gig FC-AL (OS) same as drive f on machine 1
drive D 72 gig FC-AL Raid O same as drive e on machine 1
( i have not yet put the 4 drive array on loop b yet)

Here is the issue. When machine 1 writes to one of the shared drives (e) the data cannot be seen by machine 2 until a reboot. The same can be said in reverse. After writing data on one machine, a reboot on the other will cause a checkdisk, sometimes making the drives corrupt, sometimes finding the data written by the other machine and continueing normally. Data can be read from the shared drives with no issues what-so-ever. Benchmarks as well can be run for either machine with no ill effects. I know this to be an indexing issue with 2k xp, but really don't know how to set this up to work properly any ideas would be much appreciated.

 

[yazz]

i think what you need is a fabric switch. a Fibre Channel switch will give you the ability to hook up all your harddrives to one device. the Switch has ports that your computers plug into which give you the ability to share your harddrives.

 

[ncogneto]

No thats not the problem, I can share them its just using them that is the problem.

 

[GoSharks]

<< i think what you need is a fabric switch. >>



$$$$$$$$

well idunno if this is what you are talking about or if you have already tried it, but have you unchecked "allow indexing service to index this disk for fast file searching" under the partition (disk) properties in my computer or win explorer?

idunno... just sounded like it could be something. not know anything about idexing services.

 

[ncogneto]

Yes that was the first thing I tried I've made a little progress, I have found that if I go into device manger disable the drives in the set from computer a, write data to the same set from computer b, then go back and re-enable the drives on computer a, whala, it forces a refresh of the drive and all functions perfectly well, no problems. Certainly no fix, but it does show it is a OS issue and not a hardware one. Now I just need to know How to force this refresh without so many steps involved.

 

[ncogneto]

tttttt