Technical Advisory 898

This Technical Advisory describes an issue which may or may not affect the customer’s product
Intel Technical Advisory TA-0898-1
5200 NE Elam Young Parkway
Hillsboro, OR 97124
February 19, 2008
Copyright © 2008 Intel Corporation. * Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
SATA hard-drives may not be detected on cold boot when installed in
expander enclosures with firmware version 2.06 or earlier
Information in this document is provided in connection with Intel products. No license, express or implied, by estoppel or otherwise,
to any intellectual property rights is granted by this document. Except as provided in Intel's Terms and Conditions of Sale for such
products, Intel assumes no liability whatsoever, and Intel disclaims any express or implied warranty, relating to sale and/or use of
Intel products including liability or warranties relating to fitness for a particular purpose, merchantability, or infringement of any patent,
copyright or other intellectual property right. Intel products are not intended for use in medical, life saving, or life sustaining
applications. Intel may make changes to specifications and product descriptions at any time, without notice. The Intel hot-swap
enclosures AXX6DRV3GEXP and AXX4DRV3GEXP may contain design defects or errors known as errata which may cause the
product to deviate from published specifications. Current characterized errata are available on request.
Products Affected
AXX6DRV3GEXP, MM# 877235
AXX4DRV3GEXP, MM# 877236
Description
In configurations where the expander enclosures listed above are used with a RAID controller and SATA drives, some
hard-drives may not be detected by the RAID controller when performing a cold boot (powering the system up). After
several minutes the undetected drives may light up the fault LEDs. After system reset or soft-reboot, all drives will be
detected. If this issue occurs, the RAID arrays will be degraded or failed.
Depending on the particular system configuration, the failure may never occur, may occur intermittently, or may occur
on every cold boot.
Root Cause
At a certain point during the cold boot process, the expander firmware incorrectly reports the status of SATA drives that
have not finished spinning up. This results in a communication failure between the RAID controller and the hard-drives.
Corrective Action / Resolution
The issue has been fixed in hot-swap controller firmware version 2.08. All customers using expander enclosures with
SATA hard-drives are advised to update their hot-swap controller firmware to version 2.08 or later, which can be
downloaded from the following location:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Filter_Results.aspx?strTypes=all&ProductID=2414&OSFullname=All+Operating+Syste
ms&lang=eng&strOSs=All&submit=Go%21
Please contact your Intel Sales Representative if you require more specific information about this issue.
Enterprise Platforms & Services Division
Intel Corporation