The RAID Array 1000 family from Adaptec
The RAID Array 1000 family from Adaptec, an economical WIN NT 4.0 Raid 1 solution, they say. It seems to be simple, but this controller line is end of life.
Here we talk about the revisions, which did come into our laboratory. That means, there may be some more different models in the word. All these boards are retired and rarely supported from Adaptec. So we dont know how these boards are called 1000 family, even if the are 131 and 131U ?
The Adaptec AAA-131 is the oldest board as we know. It has one of the very old LEDs soldered as error and trafiic diagnostic lamp.
As we have read on Adaptecs docs, the ram is used for running internal onboard firmware and not for caching. So there is no need and no better performance, if you think about more ram.
The firmware and/or bios is not the same than the other AAA-131 types as we fond out.
So if you receive a running ESX system with NSC xx, however with unknown passwords or any other fault, dont update the bios with any of Adaptecs offers on their download page.
The description is poorly done and if you have no old original controller, you are lost. We did download the old BIOS 4.00. from an older controller (that works, what a luck) and did upload that to the corrupted ones and then they did contionue working well.
If the red LED will not go off after boot, you have a serious problem with that controller insode that PC. Either the BIOS is wrong or the drive(s) do not respond or the board and/or CPU is to fast for that old PCI bus chip on the controller board. SO take care where you do your tests. We are using an old 350 MHz Intel board, the MSI and ASUS Duron 800 and Athlon 1000 boards do not work, surely.
The Adaptec AAA-131B seems to be a younger revision with newer chips for faster wide SCSI drives with more or better (faster) specs. We have not seen this during our research.
To see the difference easyly, check the type of "lamp", here the red LED is a white SMD square chip, soldered really deep on the board but extreemly light (red).
The Adaptec AAA-131U2 ....
... type seems to handle SE and LVD drives, all SCSI and has two of these SMD "lamps". One was never lighning. We have no LVD drives within an NSC.
Later we will name the revisons of the tools we did use to check and handle the bios and firmware.
There were two firmware files requested fromthe Bios and Driver Utility ( Rev 3.30.04) for Array 1000 boards :
you must have
7880AMx.BIO for the older AAA-131 and
7880BMx.BIO for the newer AAA-131x boards. This BIOS will display during boot Rev v4.00.21 and will work fine.
All older BIOS have the problem, to occupy the first drive letter for boot and give the main bios boot order noch chance to change the boot order for an ATA / IDE disk.
The Array config for DOS Rev 2.0 did not work with our system.
AAA-131 Downloads - but take care, they dont separate the different revisions
http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/support/drivers_by_product.jsp?sess=no&
language=English+US&cat=%2FProduct%2FAAA-131&prodkey=AAA-131