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I've got a Dell PE 860 that I recently took out of service to re-purpose. I upgraded the memory from 2GB to 8GB, and replaced 2 80GB WD 7200RPM SATA drives with 2 1TB WD 5400RPM SATA drives. Installed Win2003 64bit and thought things were good. However soon into the process of installing additional software I started running into weird lockups. The server itself wasn't locked up but the console would freeze, mouse still worked but nothing else.

Disk light could be seen thrashing. It would eventually recover, but this sent me on the hunt for what was happening. It was fairly intermittent. In looking for a way to reproduce it I found that copying large amounts of files TO the drives, while not causing it to lock up, would cause all kinds of memory access errors using TeraCopy.

I swapped back to the old memory to rule that out and get the same results. So I'm thinking it's the new drives and maybe some incompatibility with the RAID Controller, an SAS 5 (2 drives in a RAID1 configuration). I updated the firmware on it, and made sure I was running the latest drivers. None of which helped.

I'm at a roadblock and don't know what else to try. Anyone have any suggestions for me?

Thanks!

Bryan
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  • Have you checked the SMART parameters of the drives? If there is an issue with the drives you will probably see evidence of it there. – David Spillett Nov 24 '10 at 13:09
  • Thanks David. I did run the Dell HW Diagnostics and everything checked out fine. I downloaded HDDScan to try and view the SMART parameters but it doesn't look like they are available since it's in a RAID config. I'd have to take them out and look at them individually I guess. Not sure if that's appropriate at this point or not, they are brand new drives. – Bryan Nov 24 '10 at 13:29
  • What model drives are you using? If they aren't WDC's RE line you'll have problems as the drives do not support TLER; this will cause disk lockups on any errors and your RAID card will likely not report the error. – Chris S Nov 24 '10 at 13:40
  • They are WD10EADS drives. Is that in their "RE" line? I'm not sure what RE is? Or TLER for that matter :) – Bryan Nov 24 '10 at 13:53
  • Just an update, I put the old drives back in and installed a fresh copy of Win2k3 64bit and I have the same problem. I'm starting to think it's a 64bit thing. – Bryan Nov 24 '10 at 18:25

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