Adaptec/Mega

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BoomBangCrash

New Member
May 21, 2019
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Hello wise people of STH

I've been using multiple SAS2008 cards for a while and needed to free up some PCIe slots, so bought an Adaptec 72405 card (have about 20 drives connected).

My server is for media - I use Snapraid for parity so most of the drives are idle most of the time, hence I want spindown. A mix of seagate and WD 6/8/10TB drives.

I've switched the card to HBA, and have managed to get it to spin them down in Windows Server by adding the registry entry under Storport that people used to persuade the SAS2008 cards to spindown.

That works fine for about 10 minutes - it then starts spinning disks up randomly (normally one at a time). Sometimes they spin up and stay up, othertimes spin up and immediately stop (i've got a killawatt type power meter so I can hear the drive and see the consumption spike then drop back). I've used the tool drivepowerstate that shows Windows thinks they are all still spun down.

I'm assuming this is some kind of keep-alive in the driver and/or the card but hoping it's something that can be disabled - anyone seen similar/managed to fix this?
 

kapone

Well-Known Member
May 23, 2015
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What were the commands/registry settings you used for spin down? Did you modify arcsas.inf?
 

BoomBangCrash

New Member
May 21, 2019
21
15
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Created a DWORD key (EnableIdlePowerManagement=1) under-
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\PCI\VEN_9005&DEV_028C&SUBSYS_05039005&REV_01\4&aa0a8d5&0&00B0\Device Parameters\StorPort

Didn't touch the driver (i'd done that for the SAS2008s) - entered it after install. It seems okay from a Windows point of view - the drives spin down according to my windows power management setting.
 
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kapone

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May 23, 2015
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I know this is an old thread, but I wanted to put some closure around this, as I played with this off and on every now and then.

Salient points:
- The issue seems to affect only Adaptec cards, not LSI. (Different driver/hardware implementations??)
- The issue seems to (usually) affect SATA HDDs instead of SAS HDDs

I was redoing my storage server(s) recently and I decided to test this again. The servers are in Chenbro NR40700 chassis (which has two 24 port expanders) with X9SRL-F motherboards. The cards used were an Adaptec 71605 and an LSI 2308 based cards. The OS was Server 2016 (2019 acts exactly the same as well).

I connected each card to it's own expander, so that I can swap disks between them to test. The Windows registry was modified (as shown above) for both cards to allow the storport driver to allow spin down. Windows was set to spin down after 5 minutes for the test. Results:

- SATA HDDs connected to the LSI card sleep beautifully and stay asleep, until needed.
- SAS HDDs connected to the LSI card sleep beautifully and stay asleep, until needed.

- SAS HDDs connected to the Adaptec card sleep beautifully and stay asleep, until needed.
- SATA HDDs connected to the Adaptec card throw tantrums and keep waking up every ~10 minutes or so, as the poster above found.

- I eliminated hardware issues by swapping disks, expanders, slots and what not, the results were the same.
- Windows is not at fault here, because like I said, the same disks connected to the LSI card will sleep, but will keep waking up on the Adaptec.
- I even uninstalled the Adaptec Storage Manager to see if the management software was causing the disks to keep waking up. Nope, the SATA HDDs will still wake up every few minutes.
- I tried toggling on/off various options (like NCQ, cache settings etc) in the Adaptec, but the results were always the same.

Conclusion: Something in Adaptec's implementation (hardware/driver) doesn't like SATA HDDs and spin down.
 

kapone

Well-Known Member
May 23, 2015
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Are these retail cards or the hp(e) models?
These were retail, but the model of the card is irrelevant. I tested with 78165s as well. Same result.

Unfortunately these are the only two models of Adaptec I have on hand.
 

kapone

Well-Known Member
May 23, 2015
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Adaptec suck
They don't actually. They are quite flexible and performant. I really like them. This SATA/spin down issue is a bit disappointing though. Up until now, I've only had raid arrays on them (with SAS drives), and it spins down the entire array beautifully.
 

Tom5051

Active Member
Jan 18, 2017
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They don't actually. They are quite flexible and performant. I really like them. This SATA/spin down issue is a bit disappointing though. Up until now, I've only had raid arrays on them (with SAS drives), and it spins down the entire array beautifully.
you haven't tried to use one with ESXi then...
 

Tom5051

Active Member
Jan 18, 2017
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try using that 6805 with 6.7 and get the maxview cim working. yeah you know what I'm talking about