Adaptec 39160

S

sdmike

Registered
Hi all ...

We have a problem with a G4 dual 800 running Mac OS X Server v10.1.3 with 1GB RAM an 80GB internal IDE and an Adaptec 39160 card attached to 2 Seagate 73GB U160 SCSI Hard Drives. We also use 2 external Maxtor 80GB Firewire Drives for Back-up.

The issue we are having is when copying from a FireWire drive to one of the Seagate SCSI drives the data will seem to copy just fine, but after it finishes copying, if you open up the drive you copied to, there will be nothing in there. Then if I reboot, the drive I was copying to will mount just fine with all the data there, but the other Seagate will not mount and will show an error stating that there is no readable data on that drive. Reinitializing the drive will bring it back. Also, if I try to copy data between SCSI drives, either the same thing will happen or the finder will hang with the spinning rainbow of death. Using Retrospect to copy seems to work better than drop-n-drag, but either way I still have problems.

Any thoughts?
 
Got in touch with Adaptec on this one and they were puzzled, too. After a few days I called tham back. Turns out they were able to reproduce the issue. What they found out was, basically, the driver was going so fast it was choking the finder. They told me ATTO cards run at 12mbps and they measured this at 40mbps! Two things confirmed this:

1. We tried transfering data from one drive to the other using the cp command in the Terminal. The command for this is as follows (don't use quotes):

"cp -Rif /path/name /path/name"

(note there are spaces between "cp" and "-Rif", between "-Rif" and the first drive and between the two drives).

2. We jumpered the U160 drives to SE mode (Forced Single-Ended Bus Mode). This effectively forces the drive to slow down. (The downside is that these drives effectively are no longer Ultra 160s - the data xfer rate is at least half of what it was.)

After trying these two procedures, we have had none of the data corruption or freezing issues we were having. Xfer is slower, but it works. Adaptec informed me a fix will be included in a forthcoming release. They had no idea when that would be.
 
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