WD1006SRV2

[Ira Baxter]

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 at ics.uci.edu