What is the firmware version for your intel raid controller? If I remember correctly, after flashing bios on server it was at 3.7* something. Not sure the effect of having a firmware version newer than the driver being used. It's usually not reccomended.

EDIT: Actually, firmware version is 3.8 on my mboard after last bios update

We went with 3.6 driver and 3.8 RAID Option ROM and, though not recommended, that behaves itself. We are no longer paying much attention to what is recommmended, as the recommended drivers don't work!

I will begin testing with the 3.6 driver tonight
Thanks

3.6 driver will not install on 2nd scu raid controller. Do you have 1 or 2 firmwares on your board?

Just one RAID controller.
The server has two drive bays only.
It's a 1U energy efficient server, designed for hosting centres, hence the reason it will only ever be run in RAID 1 with the inbuilt RAID... which is buggy.

When I ran installer for 3.6 irste, it installed 3.6 driver on sata firmware and somehow I ended up with a 4.0 driver for the scu firmware. I'm not sure how stable that could be, two different drivers , one for sata one for scu trying to control from gui. I noticed there is a new 4.2 version. I installed and will test both with hdds and ssds. Currently using burn in test to test with hdds, if that goes well I already have a raid 1 volume of ssds I will swap them in and test again next weekend.

Hi Stephen,
just wanted to report back. 4.2 drivers running passmark burn in test for 6 days, upon stopping the test- no errors in test but when I ran a verification, mirror showed as unrepairable with several blocks with media errors. Swapped out the disk and began rebuild to another disk. Put bad disk in another machine to check smart status, no smart errors and upon deleting the raid volume, disk shows as normal and healthy.

I think 4.1 was the newest driver we ever tested with.
So it looks like 4.2 is also broken then.
Thanks for letting me know.

Hi Stephen and Billy,
first of all thanks for sharing your tests (that I following from some days) and I would point out that I'm not an expert.

I have a similar problem (a lot of parity errors) with the workstation that I would build for my office.
My configuration is:
- PC HP Z440
- chipset C612
- HDD not in RAID (OS = win 7 installed by HP)
- two SSD (SAMSUNG 850 PRO) in RAID 1 (OS = win 7 installed by me)
- RAID ROM 4.1.0.1026


I found problems with:

1_ driver 4.1.0.1026 (preinstalled by HP on HDD)
GUI 4.1.0.1026
parity errors with RSTe verification

2_ driver 3.6.0.1086 (installed by me on SSD RAID 1)
GUI 3.6.0.1094
parity errors with RSTe verification

3_ driver 4.2.0.1136 (installed by me on SSD RAID 1)
GUI 4.2.0.1142
from the GUI disappeared the "parity errors" report
(but I think that this not solved the problem because if do a verification booting from HDD (GUI 4.1.0.1026) parity errors come out)

I not really need RAID 1 on my machine so probably I'll go for a more frequent/bare metal backup.

P.S.: if I don't care of parity errors found by RSTe verification all looks like OK (RAID status normal and windows works), if I unplug one drive or the other one all looks like OK.
Could be this a false posive error segnalation? Or I will found problems in the future if I undervalue this problem?

Thanks and have a nice weekend
Fabio

If the problem goes away with 3.6 driver and 3.8 option ROM, then it is likely that you have found the same bug as us.

Under light load, this problem does not happen for a few days or weeks. But you really don't want to leave this problem unaddressed, unless you like rebuilding RAID arrays - I have found that the novelty quickly wore off for our IT guy :-)

Please report this problem to support@supermicro.nl.

There doesn't appear to be any way to report this problem to Intel - they slopey-shoulder the problem onto SuperMicro.

They will probably ask you to do all sorts of tests. But make sure you don't waste your time doing tests that have already been done and are documented here - we already know that no recent driver fixes the problem. Please point them to this thread and one day there might be enough documented cases of the problem for it to get prioritised to be fixed.

I reported it this morning.

Found a Way to install 3.6 drivers last night, I'm currently running stress test until next week, I'll report back

So far so good, up to about 70 million transactions and no errors but the real test will be Friday evening when I run a parity verification.