NASLite Network Attached Storage

I have 3ware Escalade 7500-4 RAID card. It is a 'full-length' card and is longer than the PCI slot on my motherboard which is 'conventional' PCI length. Will the 7500-4 work placed in the shorter slot? It fits but overhangs at the end!

short answer [i guess] is try it - if its like the scsi cards of the same pci design then its 64 bit - i have one of them that works perfectly in a 'short/normal' pci slot

so i would be hopeful of yours if the chipset is recognised/supported

My Adaptec 2610SA worked fine in a short slot as did my 3Ware 7500-8. The only downside is reduced throughput.

OK Thanks. The PC 'sees' the card - i.e. it does list it during boot-up. However when I try to enter the set-up utility I can get in but none of the 3 drives attached show up? It does also say that it's missing a BIOS. Have tried to load same but without success. Anyone have a link to instructions on flashing the BIOS on this particular card?

All the info I can find on 3ware Escalade 7500-4 says 64bit, not 32/64bit. Chances are, your card does not support 32 bit mode and flashing the bios will either be unsuccessful at best or worse, destroy your card.

It supports both I have read...

One issue I found doing a google search may or may not be pertinent to your situation:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/free ... 47921.html

Could be that your mobo just doesn't like the 3ware Escalade. Have you tried a different slot? Sometimes a shared virtual IRQ will whack things out.

Tony? Ralph? dimension? NickC? mikeiver1? Any ideas?

Most 64bit cards will drop back to 32bit mode and function just fine. Some cards are 5/3.3 Volt compliant and some are just 3.3 only. They will not fit due to the PCI slot keying, generally if it fits it should work. This is the interface side of things.

The BIOS issue may or may not be resolved by simply moving the card to another PCI slot. Be sure and turn off every other device on the MB that is not needed. Another issue with the drives not being seen may be that there is no delay for the drives to spin up and become available. I have seen this in the past, if the card sees no drives it will not load its BIOS and that will be that. Pull the drives and try accessing the BIOS as soon as the flash screen shows.

I am sorry but I have little time to be looking into the card in detail right now. Hope the above helps a little.

Mike

Thanks for that. I moved the card to another PCI slot and slowed the hard-drive spin up to 30 seconds. No success.
Booted using a DOS floppy and ran upgrade.bat - seemed to run OK . Saw the following which seems to be right for the 7500-4
BIOS BE7X - 1.08.00.048 (yet it says no BIOS??)
Firmware FE7X/S - 1.05.00.068 (NEW)
Models supported 7xxx-xx, 850x-xx Rev-3, 4 (PCI-33, 66)
Still wont see the 3 Seagate 320GB PATA drives.
It's an MP440BX Intel bespoke motherboard from c. 1998 made for a Gateway G6-350 tower.
The PCI slots comply with the PCI specification Rev. 2.1, +5 V 33-MHz interface

This seems to point back to the reason I posted a link in a previous reply. Even though the info was referring to the 7500-4 being used in a FreeBSD installation, they mentioned that it needed full PCI 2.2 compliance to work. I don't know if the drivers used in NASLite are the same as FreeBSD, but the problem does seem similar. You might try booting your box with Ubuntu and see if you get the same results. That may answer the question as to whether it is a hardware incompatibility issue.

I'll try Ubuntu tonight.
Had a look at a document from 2002;
http://www.3ware.com/products/pdf/Escal ... 6-7.qk.pdf

It does say
Escalade 7500 Series Specifications
• PCI 2.2 compliant 64-bit/33MHz bus master
• Auto-sensing ATA/133/100/66/33 disk drive interface
• BIOS PnP (plug and play), and BBS (BIOS boot services) compliant

Does this mean it's not backward compatible with PCI 2.1 I wonder?...

Unfortunately, probably. Backwards compatibility would suggest that a v2.1 card would function correctly in a v2.2 slot but not vice-versa.

Unfortunately, I believe NickC is correct. In my experience, unless a PCI 2.2 card specifically lists 2.1 compatibilty, you're out of luck unless you can find a bios upgrade for your mobo that ups the PCI spec to 2.2.