Technical Advisory 958

This Technical Advisory describes an issue which may or may not affect the customer’s product
Intel Technical Advisory TA-0958-2
5200 NE Elam Young Parkway
Hillsboro, OR 97124
April 14, 2011
Copyright © 2011 Intel Corporation. * Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
Drive errors may occur when using certain 3
rd
party drives operating at 3.0 Gb/s
in expander backplanes.
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
®
Server Drive
Enclosure 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
Intel
®
Server Drive Enclosure AXX6DRV3GEXP
Intel
®
Server Drive Enclosure AXX4DRV3GEXP
Description
Drives may go offline or report errors in the operating system and RAID error logs when Western Digital RE3 series
SATA drives are used and set to operate at 3.0 Gb/s and are installed in an Intel
®
Server Backplane AXX6DRV3GEXP
or AXX4DRV3GEXP. The issue is only seen when the drives run at SATA 3.0 Gb/s, and does not occur at 1.5 Gb/s.
Although most other drive models operate correctly when set to 3.0 Gb/s, it is possible that this issue could be
experienced when using other drive models as well.
Root Cause
The SAS expander chip on Intel
®
Server Drive Enclosure AXX6DRV3GEXP and AXX4DRV3GEXP may experience an
undesired flow-control behavior when connected to some SATA disk drive models when they are running at 3.0 Gb/s.
Drives operating at 3.0 Gb/s may not receive proper data or SATA flow control which can then result in a drive timeout
error. This issue is not experienced when drives have negotiated to 1.5 Gb/s SATA bus speed. This interoperability
limitation of the SAS expander with SATA disk drive is currently seen on Western Digital’s RE3 series SATA drives and
may be experienced with other SATA drive models as well when they are set to run at 3.0 Gb/s SATA bus speed.
Corrective Action / Resolution
The issue will be fixed in hot-swap controller firmware. It is targeted to be publicly released in July, 2011. All customers
using Intel
®
Server Drive Enclosure AXX6DRV3GEXP and AXX4DRV3GEXP with SATA hard-drives and RAID
controllers are advised to update their hot-swap controller firmware to the new version. Once the firmware is ready, the
URL for download will be added to this document
Please contact your Intel Sales Representative if you require more specific information about this issue.
Enterprise Platforms & Services Division
Intel Corporation