Firmware update for PERC 3/QC, PERC 3/DC, PERC 3/DCL and PERC 3/SC ------------------------------------------------------------------ TABLE OF CONTENTS ----------------- 1.0 Introduction 2.0 Contents of the Kit 3.0 Performing the Firmware Upgrade 4.0 Change History 5.0 Known Limitations ___________________________________________________________ 1.0 Introduction ------------------ This firmware update delivers bug fixes and enhancements for following PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controllers. PERC 3/QC (161n) PERC 3/DC (161n) PERC 3/DCL (161n) PERC 3/SC (1.63) NOTE: ----- Your controller should be running firmware ver 1.57 or higher for this firmware update. If you have a PERC 3/DCL running firmware version 1.48 then please update to firmware v1.57 before this update. ____________________________________________________________ 2.0 Contents of the Kit ------------------------- This kit contains following files, PERC3-fw172.exe ____________________________________________________________ 3.0 Performing the Firmware Upgrade ----------------------------------- This program creates a bootable diskette to upgrade the firmware of the controllers. You will need a formatted 3 1/2 inch floppy diskette for the following procedure. 1) Download the file to a directory on your hard drive. The file downloaded is a self extracting executable. 2) Double click on the file to run the executable. 3) Click on the setup button. 4) Follow the on screen instructions to create the firmware update diskette. 5) To perform the upgrade, boot using this diskette. ____________________________________________________________ 4.0 Change History ------------------ Component Current ver Previous version --------- ----------- ---------------- Firmware 1.72 161n/1.63 BIOS 3.27 3.17 Ctrl-M 5.54 5.39 WebBIOS (Ctrl-H) 1.47 1.41 ___________________________________________________________ Firmware Bug Fixes or Enhancements: ----------------------------------- 1. When the new Logical Drive has more than 4 drives, started a consistency check at the newly added data. 2. System hangs due to failed PCI Transactions generated by Host. Added Firmware work around to guarantee Command Integrity. 3. Data miscompare problem due to misbehaving signal on i960RN after Power-Cycle. 4. Changed DRAM Signature to work around HW problem and properly recover dirty data in Cache. 5. Random Deletion feature of logical drives is enabled. 6. Check is put in for SAF-TE presence when looking for predictive failures. 7. Firmware now throttles the outstanding commands to the drives in a case of drive time-outs. 8. Chip timeout and chip reset could occur during recovery of write commands in write back mode. It is now fixed. 9. Reduced group size for caching to support stripe size of 2K. 10. The difference in number of pending command is detected to improve FASTIO R1 load balancing. 11. The firmware now determines the disk whose head is nearer to the requested LBA. 12. Memory allocating for different cache pools in the ratio of logical drives associated with each cache poll BIOS Enhancements Changes in respect to previous release 3.17 ------------------------------------------------------------- 1. More time delay introduced for invoking CTRL M & CTRL H. 2. To display in mother board BIOS BBS menu as PERC 3/DCL. 3. BIOS Grammatical Errors figured out by DELL are fixed. 4. A bug in the code, which prevented the invoking of CTRL-M, is fixed in this release. Ctrl-M Changes since 5.39 -------------- 1. Disallow spanning across partially configured arrays. 2. To allow different memory segments usage by Ctrlm to make newer bigger Ctrlm run on many DELL motherboards. 3. Logical drives with number larger than zero being in background initialization were detected as being in check consistency state. This has been fixed. 4. Distinguish background initialization and background check consistency. 5. “SCSI Standard” string in physical drive information window was misspelled as “SCSI Sdandard”. 6. Added support for PERC 4/DI. 7. Added support for the CERC ATA100/4Ch Controller. 8. Support added for NAS features. 9. Added En/Disable Write cache option in physical device menu if device is SCSI DISK. WebBios Changes in respect to previous release 1.41 1. When we span 8 arrays during create LD, WebBIOS takes 9 and creates a LD. This was happening only in the cluster-enabled mode. This is fixed now. 2. If user selects a filled array (i.e one with no empty space) during create, we were running into problems. This is fixed. 3. Support added for Random Deletion of Logical drives. ___________________________________________________________ 5.0 Known Limitations --------------------- Firmware upgrade while controller is doing background I/O task -------------------------------------------------------------- Firmware upgrade process will fail if any background I/O task (i.e. RAID-5 background consistency check or power on auto-resume rebuild and reconstruction) is being performed. The program will stop at the "Flash Download" screen with the following message: "Warning: Firmware download is in progress. Do not reboot the system. It may cause corruption of flash or host adapter configuration". Firmware and configuration on the adapter will not be modified by the program. A reboot can be performed to return to the Operating System. Wait until the background task completes before updating the firmware. Installing the PERC 3/DC and 3/QC in a PowerEdge 8450 System ------------------------------------------------------------- If the PE8450 has a four channel PERC 2 controller installed along with the PERC 3/QC or PERC 3/DC then PERC 2 Ctrl-A utility may not work during system boot up. This is due to the limited amount of option ROM space for that system. In this situation, configure PERC 2 controller using OS level application or remove other controllers. Migrating from the PERC 2 to the PERC 3 controllers --------------------------------------------------- If you are migrating from the PERC 2 to the PERC 3 controllers you should back up your files to tape and then install the PERC 3.