baxter@argentine.ICS.UCI.EDU (Ira Baxter) (12/02/89)
A number of folk have apparantly had some lockup troubles using the Western Digital 1006SRV2 controller card (rev 005) and ISC 2.0.2. The symptom is that under heavy disk loads, the hard disk access LED will go hard on, and any process that attempts thereafter to access the disk will end up getting stuck in a wait (i.e., the system isn't dead but is definitely useless). The problem is rare: my particular system locks up once every couple of weeks, although I had quite a bit of trouble when I was installing 386ix; the problem seems to be aggravated when loading the content of floppy disks. [A question for ISC: why doesn't the disk driver for 2.0.2 diagnose some sort of problem under these circumstances?] I have direct access to one of the WD support engineers for this product. In an effort to decide if the problem is machine-specific or is truly a problem with the WD design, she has asked me to query netlanders about their experience with this board; the purpose is to get an understanding of how often this occurs, so we would like to hear from folk that have had trouble, and folk that have had flawless operation. Information on machine configuration (motherboard vendor, clock speed, AT bus speed, drive, etc.) is valuable. Please respond directly to me, and I will summarize for the net. Also, there was a message on this group to a purported "cure" related to a jumper; the support engineer tells me the only useful jumper turns off the disk readahead cacheing, which would make the real utility of the board effectively nil. My local mail archives only have references to such messages, but no messages with content. We'd like to hear a precise description of the the cure and following experience anyway, from those of you that have tried it. I have no affiliation with WD other than desiring to make the board I bought from them 100% reliable. (I will say in WD's defense that they seem very interested in solving the problem, and other than this minor annoyance, I'm very happy with the board.) Thanks, Ira D. Baxter Department of Information and Computer Science UC Irvine, Irvine CA 92717 (714) 856-6693 baxter@ics.uci.edu