[otoc]

Originally Posted by blue68f100

The IDE controller on the old units do not use/support 80 cond. The IDE controller chips are to old. Remember these were design when 8 gig was considered massive, 1998-99. The reason we discovered some drives did not play well with them, EIDE issues.

Phoenix is our hardware expert, he may shine some more light on the subject.

Platformbytes are used for software upgerades. Once you change it you need to re-install the software to get every thing required for your hardware.

Thanks. This is getting interesting.

So far the hacked 2000 is functioning fine with the 80 cond cable using M/S and not C/S. It's rebuilding the Raid 5 array after I took a drive off line to see if it recognized a single drive failure or a total loss of the 2 drives on that channel.

Then thing of note is that the update to V4 killed the visibility of the slave drives that were functioning fine with the V3 software and the 80 cond cables with these old mismatched drives.

Changing the PlatformBytes to match a real 4000 brought the slaves back into the picture. No software update was done, though I have since reapplied the latest V4 I have.

I'm not convinced that this hacked 2000 will operate with the security I expect and I'm going to pull the master off a channel to see if the proper process is repeated without error again.

The issues I've seen referenced and what I'm looking for (loss of full channel in M/S, ability to C/S, ATA 100/133 compatability) may be drive related or cable related:

40 and 80 cond Cables should be interchangable with the 80 preferred for signal integrity and ability to C/s out of the box,
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/conf_CS.htm

Warning: 80-conductor IDE/ATA cables are often said to be compatible with 40-conductor cables. That's true of normal 40-conductor cables with drives jumpered as master and slave, but not cable select cables. If you swap a regular (non-"Y-shaped") 40-conductor cable select cable with an 80-conductor IDE cable, the master and slave drives will swap logical positions. If you don't want that to happen, you'll need to change the order that the devices connect to the cable.

Drive related issues with our older chipset (same source as above):

On new systems there are few issues with running Ultra DMA, because the hardware is all new and designed to run in Ultra DMA mode. With older systems, things are a bit more complex. In theory, new drives should be backwards compatible with older controllers, and putting an Ultra DMA drive on an older PC should cause it to automatically run in a slower mode, such as PIO mode 4. Unfortunately, certain motherboards don't function well when an Ultra DMA drive is connected, and this may result in lockups or errors. A BIOS upgrade from the motherboard manufacturer is a good idea, if you are able to do this. Otherwise, you may need to use a special Ultra DMA software utility (available from the drive manufacturer) to tell the hard disk not to try to run in Ultra DMA mode. The same utility can be used to enable Ultra DMA mode on a drive that is set not to use it. You should use the utility specific to whatever make of drive you have.

If this configuration passes the test with my old drives, my next step is to test with new faster, bigger ones and see if the M/S still works and if not, if C/S works or if the drives need to be forced to step down their transfer rates.

Any thoughts as I test this out will be greatly appreciated.