[CentOS] Adaptec 39320A woes

Wed Aug 8 10:19:06 UTC 2007
Plant, Dean <dean.plant at roke.co.uk>

David Groep wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Plant, Dean wrote:
>> Simple fix,
>> 
>> Adaptec & CentOS = :-(
>> LSI & CentOS = :-)
> 
> Which is why after a few hours of testing I decided to indeed buy a
> couple of LSI cards to test with -- far better than a lot of
> frustration. 
> 
> But, meanwhile, I decided to test one more thing: just suppose that
> the SCSI auto-negotiation, which worked fine before, had suddenly
> given up in version 3.0 of the aic79xx driver?
> 
> I forced the transfer rate in the Adaptec BIOS for those IDs to the
> maximum that my Infortrend could support (U160) and for good measure
> disabled "Disconnect" as well. Then, rebooted into 2.6.18-8.1.6&8, and
> it worked: User==Goal==Curr==160.0 MB/s.
> Apparently, the latest aic79xx driver V3.0 does no longer support
> auto-negotiation, whereas all drivers <=1.3.11 did negotiate
> correctly. 
> 
> Michael, maybe that works for you as well (unless your tapedrive
> actually does do U320)?
> 

We tested forcing the speeds as well. The tape drive worked but when
stress testing we found backups over > 2TB would never complete.

Dean