>> two3-ware cards, one 9640SE-24 and one 9640SE-16
> Sounds like they're sharing something they shouldn't be. I'm not real > familiar with PCI-express. Aren't those the ones that use up to 16 > channels for I/O? Can you divide it to 8 and 8 for each PCI-express > slot in the BIOS maybe, or something like that?
I can't find the 9640SE-24/16 anywhere, but presuming these are similar to (or are actually) the 9650SE cards then each of them is using 8 lanes of the 16 available. I'd need to know the exact motherboard or system to even have a clue what the options are for adjusting the BIOS and whether they are shared or independant.
But I haven't seen one where there's any real ability to adjust how the I/O is partitioned beyond adjusting what slot you plug things into so that's probably a dead end anyway. Given the original symptoms, one thing I would be suspicious of though is whether there's some sort of IRQ conflict going on. Sadly we still haven't left that kind of junk behind even on current PC motherboards.
Thanks, Greg. After a little digging, 3-ware suggested moving one of the cards, also. We will probably give that a try. I'll also look into the bios, but since the machine is running as a fileserver, there is precious little time for downtime tinkering. FYI, here are the specs on the server.