*** Official Clevo x7200 and Sager NP7280 owners lounge ***

Rebooted due to drive failure(s) according to entries in event viewer. Lost 2 drives and it rebooted. I just got off phone with Sagar after speaking to Xotic and Sagar.....seems everyone who has reported raid(1, 0 or 5) issues has had the hybred drives.

So I am tossing in some Western Digital Scorpio Blacks I have soon as the raid finishs rebuilding. Will keep ya updated. Not a happy camper at this point.

The drives going into degraded was bad, but recoverable if it happened, but the reboot because of loosing 2....ug. This is the last thing we (me/Xotic/Sagar) could think of, if this doesnt take care of the issue its a chipset issue, which means send it in to have the MB replaced.

 

Thinking about upgrading the CPU down the road once the SNB chips drive down the price of LGA-1366 CPUs. (At least that is what I hope will happen).

In any case, was thinking about Coolaboratory ultra, but the gallium in the TIM corrodes aluminum.

Thanks for the pix!

 

Still hoping it is the drives. Although that means I need to be wary of RAID-5 / Momentus XT's in this machine.

 

Right now the 960 would be the CPU to get for 1366. The extremes will not drop in price much for a while unless you buy a used one. If you can, the best place to get new Intel CPUs is always Micro Center

i7 960 for $250 brand new
Micro Center - Intel Core i7-960 3.2GHz LGA 1366 Boxed Processor 269589

 

Yea me also re: the drives. If it IS the drives and how they interract with the array, I would say be wary at the minimum, or to be safe, replace em. I wont know for a few days at best though if the total drives replacement fixes the issue, and even if it does, there will always be a little paranoid in the back of my mind.

It is interesting everything I have found with raid array issues and this model has also been with the XT drives.

Like I said, a rebuild is bad and annoying, a reboot like that is over the line....

 

How is your performance with Raid 5? I know it does not do as well on software controllers (All the Intel southbridges employ this method of raid) compared to hardware controllers that obviously we cannot have in a laptop

 

You shouldn't have a problem, the liquid ultra will only make contact with the copper on the heatsink and the nickel plated copper surface of the cpu, no aluminium touched

You do have to be extra careful with it though, I can understand why people dont bother with it

 

Eh......its not bad at all, read times are about 2X as fast, write is only maby 1.5X as fast at best due to writing the parity. Granted a real HW controller would scream, but aint gonna happen in a laptop.

I have it more for the data protection, TBH......I dident loose any performance so I am happy.

Now if I can only determine whats causeing the raid5 issues I am having......rebuilding the array REALLY knocks any performance through the floor.

 

Already at an i7-970 (see sig) as I need a hex core for VMs and multiple source compilations. Was hoping about the 980X/990X might have a significant drop in 6-8 mos time.

 

How's the heat holding? I flashed the extra Hybrid I mentioned a while back. When I replaced the drive w/ my original, it had to rebuild. Heat jumped 8C - 9C during the rebuild.

 

Have not seen any heat iissues to be honest, still runs about 50c at idle. As soon as this rebuild is done, I will be makeing a image and pulling out the 3 XT's and putting in the WD Scorpios.....I REALLY hope this fixes the issue. RMA's suck.

The more I think abiout this, the more I think its the drives. I am thinking it may have something to do with the 4GB SSD up front and how that handles being raided. Seagate did something funky with the way those drives determine most used files, and I am thinking that may not play nice with raid. And that would explain the 2-4 day interval between failures, thats how long the drives take to determine most often used files.

Anyone have any thoughts on this ?

 

Looks like I may need to relenquish my "Fastest Laptop" crown to you....I only scored a 2127.8

 

I think Seagate and/or Intel would be the best to answer.

<My rambling>However, if I were to guess, I wouldn't think that would be the problem. From specs, we know the 4GB NAND flash of the drive is read only. So the drive's firmware must have something similar in fashion to a look-up for L1 or L2 cache found within a CPU.

Again, if I understood what I read in the Momentus XT Tech spec., the "most read" blocks on your drive get mapped into the SSD portion. But the drive STILL has the data at that same location, so as data is striped, when an request goes out for a bit of information, it is going to request the data as where it is stored on disk. The drive should recognize that drive location exists (or does not exist) in the SSD portion, and do the appropriate thing, retrieve it from the SSD or retrieve it from disk. So while each drive would have its own 4GB SSD section, as long as the disk requests come in for data according to disk address, it will just retrieve the data from possibly two different locations.

Also note, I haven't even taken into account the drive's disk cache, which would also have a similar mechanism to retrieve data from the cache vs. going to SSD/platters for the information.

I wonder if there's something wrong with what the drive needs to write to each disk to maintain a member of the RAID. Perhaps the XTs at some low level don't write the correct information regarding RAID status, membership, etc. when it is split across multiple drives. This would then cause the array to go into degraded status.

Also, it would be interesting if someone had a test machine if they could test the same exact hardware configuration, but use the Intel Matrix RAID drivers instead. Perhaps something in the way the drivers operate is the root cause.
</My rambling>


FWIW, I found this Momentus XT – what the experts are saying

Granted it is from a Seagate Marketing Product Manager, but I don't think RAID 5 is out of bounds on the Momentus XTs.

 

I would just not bother using the XT's in raid, that would be overcomplicating things I think. The performance gain from RAID it self would be all that is needed and far outweigh the benefit of the small cache on the XT drives

 

Oh, I dunno. The 4GB SSD could easily hold a lot of system files, providing for a very quick startup. Spreading those files over 8GB (the other would be CRC based) would surely cover something like Windows 7 system files required for boot.

The question is, how can you get the OS files to be stored in the SSD section of the drives.

This raises a good point. wwoods, what is your boot time in seconds? Time from BIOS screen to windows login? Time from 1st Windows 7 starting to login?

I guess we can't tell w/ the degraded drives, but it would have been interesting to know if the OS files made it to the SSD section. Probably be biased as well as we'll each have different services running. For instance, besides all the x7200 device drivers, I am also running IIS, SQL Server and all of its reporting services.

 

Do the XT drives cache files or blocks though? Because once RAID'd you no longer have full files but rather parts of files on each drive

 

From my understanding, just blocks. The drive itself shouldn't understand the notion of a file system. It would just copy heavily requested blocks from the platters into the SSD. So any block in the SSD would also be found on the platters. The Intel RAID drivers would take care of splitting up the files into blocks and then sending those requests out to the members of the RAID volume.


Again, I don't claim to be a Seagate Momentus XT drive expert, but rather someone who is relying on the research of others.

 

Hi there, can anyone tell me if this Vantage score for my laptop is ok - forgive the stupid question but not sure about these things tbh! My spec is i7 950, 6gb, with SLI 485m's. just seems a bit strange / low comapred to other?

Result

 

That is extremly low m8
go in in the manu in vantage an set to performance and use all standard settings here is my result and yours should be higher Result
scrol down and see the settings
i will pm you a link to a advance edition DL

 

Sorry i think i am being realystupid here and actually ran 3d Mark 11 not Vantage! Would that make sense? Thanks

 

Correct me if im wrong but his link is for 3dmark 11 and I know that the current (official 485m driver) SLI isnt supported by 3dmark so no sli, his score seems about right but... there is a work around using NVIDIA Inspector 1.90 that allows you to use sli and 3d mark 11 so I would say for the most part thats about right for a single card score (in 3dMark 11 not vantage), but im sure there are
far more tech savvy guys here that can help more than me.

 

Dont wurry i must be blind for not seeing that when i jumped to your score but give it a try with the link i gave you if you dont have the retail ver of vantage already

 

Do they COPY the blocks to the SSD portion or MOVE them.....tat could be the difference (and pose a problem) right there.......

Also, from what Sager and Xotic have told me, the only raid issues they have seen or had reported to them on this model have been useing the XT drives.....

Looks like not going to have a chance to replace the drives today, just got a call and need to run to ilwaukee for a meeting this afternoon, then I get to come home and sleep for work tonight.....yea me

 

Hence the reason I dont have a 3dmark11 in my sig, I will run that soon as some drivers that support SLI come out for that.

 

From Seagate's Momentus XT Reviewed, Finally a Good Hybrid HDD -

I read that as a COPY.

If the storage on the NAND is read-only, then a write would have to go to the disk. Also, as drive address frequencies changes with use, then the SSD data would be shunted off to platters as "more popular" data takes its place in the SSD portion. This would create a fragmentation nightmare. With that said, I'm still sticking with my ramblings from the previous post, and the SSD works as a COPY of the most accessed data on the drive.

Also just to reiterate (for CYA reasons), "I don't claim to be a Seagate Momentus XT drive expert."

 

Since we're talking about these drives (XT, Scorpio) and I have a C300, thought I'd mention I found this article right here on notebook review - SSD vs Hard Drives: A Beginner's Guide to SSD Upgrades

 

Well, I guess we see, maby I will talk to a few buddies at work and have them look into this a bit for me. In the meantime, tommarrow, I am gonna yank these XT's out and drop in the WB Scorpios, call it coincidence, but with Sager and Xotic and seeing the other issues I have rewad about with these drives and raid on the net......

Maby will loose a little performance, but I will live with that for some peace of mind.

If that doesnt fix the issue, its RMA time.......I hate that thought


SHEIT........

Intel RST reporting Port 1 disk failed....sigh......rebuilding, all I was doin was listening to some MP3's...... talking with service manager right now...


I am wondering, I have upgraded the Intel RST on the laptop from the original version to version 10.1 found here on Intel’s site, think that would have any bearing on the issue ?

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Det...apid+Storage+Technology+(Intel®+RST)&lang=eng

 

Same one on the x7200 wiki page, correct?

Just to verify, are you saying you started with the Intel Matrix drivers, and then switched to Intel RST drivers after setup? If you recall, I did the same thing (see history of this thread), but am using RAID-1, not RAID-5.

There's one way to find out... which was one of the options we had talked about a while back -> moving the drives around and rebuilding from scratch.

 

Yea, I started with Matrix and then switched to RST. Not gonna bother moving the drives around at this point. As of now I have failures in port(s) 0,1 and 2, so its not isolated to any one port or hard drive. It can only be 1 of 2 things in my opinion, those XT's dont play nice or the comntroller. Tomarrow after work I will be pulling all the XT's out and dropping in WD Scorpios.

If the problem persists, RMA. If the problem stops, then there is a compatability issue with XT's and the raid controller (at least in Raid5). Take a look at this thread though....

Guy here, same drives, same system in a Raid0...same problems:
Sager NP7280 Owners Lounge - XOTICPC Forums

Also, according to the Service Mamanger at Xotic, he has had this issue I am seeing reported with those drives, as well as the Sagar tech I spoke to.

Granted with the scorpios I will loos a little speed, maby because of the 4G SSD NAND, but if it fixes the issue, so be it.

 

What model scorpio blacks? I have had 320s for a few years and they are ok but was taking interest in the 750s that are out now

 

I am putting in 3 of these, Western Digital Scorpio 2.5-Inch 500 GB SATA Internal Hard Drive WD5000BEKT

The plan is to make a system image, yank out all 3 XT's, install 3 WD Blacks, set up in a Raid5, boot off windows rescue media and load the image.

The windows rescue media should see the raid5 as just one big drive......

That should get me the exact same load out running on the Blacks...and then wait. I thought about the 750's byt TBH dont need 1.5TB disk space right now

 

Cool stuff, I am interested to see what your results are.

 

Interesting how "SmogHog" is also having a similar problem with RAID-0 with "2 WD Blacks" - Scorpios, I presume. See his post on page 7.

If you could, could you ask what SmogHog is using for RAID drivers and how he installed? From his post, it looks like he used the RST drivers from the start. Also, did he stay fresh on the install or do a system restore - as you may be doing.

Perhaps there is something in that process causing the problem.

I do see one other difference, upon Win 7 installation on my end, I used the F6 - install other drivers - choose RAID from the CD-ROM during system installation.** My last machine was a Sager NP9260 from Xotic - which ran RAID-5. Had to use the F6 - install RAID drivers then too. No other way to get it to work after the fact.

That leads to another question. Perhaps there is something wrong when using F6 at install vs. converting to RAID-5, in that the data is not correctly striped/CRC'ed amongst the 3 drives.

In any case, as scook9 said, keep us posted.

-----------------
** This is done after I already set up the RAID volumes in the BIOS upon first boot.

 

FYI - Xotic has 6970s available on the x7200 and other higher-end Sagers now.

$250 cheaper upgrade per card than the GTX 485 for about 7% less performance. nVidia is gonna get clobbered in the high-end mobile market

However, 470s are back in stock and only cost $345 for SLI which I'm betting will be a good deal faster than a single 6970 -- probably the best bang-for-your-buck option.

 

for you guys that have the 485m there is a new driver on laptopvideo2go 266.40 here is a Pic



Here is the link to the DL
ftp://cftp.clevo.com.tw/P170HM/VGA/FX2800M_64.zip

 

I had also offered to mod in support but no one took up my offer and provided me the needed inf files

 

If anyone wants, feel free to keep the x7200 wiki page up to speed on that as well.

 

Doh, I am sorry scook9, I am the one ya asked but that totally slipped my mind with the raid issues I have been having

 

DLing now....slow as all, but downloading. Anyone useing yet have any reports ?

 

No worry Wwoods, if you get a chance put up the infs and I will look at it. I wont have a system to test with obviously but it is a pretty straightforward mod actually.

I would worry about making things work before making them work better as well

 

Yea, will be swapping out the drives here in the next hr or so, unfortunately I wont know if there is a issue for a day or so (useally takes that long for a failure), even if nothing happens though, will always be in back of mind nagging me, thats worst part really, only way to know something is if it doesnt happen like proving a negitive....it sucks.

This is literally my last ditch effort, if this doesnt fix it, then RMA for a MB replacement.

So the BIG question now, fresh reinstall on the Raid5 or restore system image ? NOw that I think about it, will do image......all the latest drivers should be on the image now anyway since I am useing Intel's latest RST

 

Hello all, I am a brand new member, and this is my first post. On the 14th I ordered a "Nine" from Malibal with the 980 cpu, and dual 470m GPUs. 2 7200rpm HDs in raid 0, and 6gb of ram. As I'm sure you are all aware, having been in my shoes, I am practically pissing my pants in excitement. I'm happy to be part of the cool kids club, and look forward to meeting and BSing with you all. No doubt your experience with the machine I have just bought will come in handy as well.
Leonard Rockstien, the rock and roll clown.

 

Here is a org inf from the 266.58 driver you have to ask one of the 485 guys for the inf with 485 lines so you can swap them over by the way its the 64 bit one
File name: nvwi.inf File size: 49.30 KB

 

Welcome. ... And BTW, keep the c*caine use to a minimum! We wouldn't wanna kick you out of this band. <Inside joke for those who do not know Dr. Rockzo>

 

Here is somthing i just found out on MVKtech take the new 267 driver take the nvcv.inf and replace it with the one you have from the latest clevo driver for the 485 and then install zap zarap your done. and it works fine according to the persons that have done it

 

Well, thought would update ya all on the Raid5 issues. Made the image and pulled all 3 XT's and am now running on WD Scorpios's. The image took forever to reinstall, I am assumiung because it was building the parity drive at the same time.

One note about removing th drive, what they hell Sager user to tighten the screws a toque wrench...damm they were in there tight.

Booted up fine, no errors. So will be putting this thing through its paces at work tonight, VM's and all...

So now its all about the waiting....I have saved all my old event logs and cleared them, so anything that shows up in there is now new.

 

Hope every thing goes all right for you this time (holding my thums )

 

Thanks, this mess is getting really old....one a bright side, I have been in contact daily with the service dept and manager of Xotic....there doin it good.

 

seems you guys are using modded inf
is there any version (not clevo one) can adjust brightness using Fn+F8,F9??

 

that is not a driver (inf) concern but rather a keyboard firmware/system bios issue

Do you have the drivers for the keyboard loaded? May just be a registry edit that is needed. I know on my Alienware the on-screen display software enables all the hot keys and on the OCZ whitebook I had before that it was just a .reg file I had to run.