RocketRAID 2720SGL Sleep fail

Hi all,

I built a CustoMac from all of the parts from the tonymac list and everything has gone great, but it's always that one extra part. Wantint a nice redundant RAID1/0 - I bought a RAID controller for the new system and after many other (hopefully now fixed) problems I've narrowed a new one down to the 2720SGL.

That is, if I unmount the partitions on the 2720 manually, sleep works perfectly forever and a day, but if the drive is mounted then sleep will fail.

Has anyone else encountered this or know of a workaround? It would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for this tip. I also had the alarm go off upon emerging from sleep. This workaround is great.

Have you noticed whether the 2720SGL card still works when plugged into an x4 lane PCIe slot? I am having trouble with my PCIe bus and I'm not sure whether the issue is the card or my motherboard.

I meant to also add that the alarm only went off one time, when I entered sleep manually and emerged quickly to normal mode. My motherboard is a Gigabyte UP5 TH. Other times, when sleep was entered automatically, there was no issue. But that also could have been only display sleep, I can't remember now.

Hey there, I eventually got this working properly but it was quite the ordeal, here's what I did.

FIRST, I discovered the hard way, (and by hard way I mean by having my RAID 10 arrays killed twice) that my card (2720SGL) came with BIOS level 1.0. This is not a good BIOS level and isn't even compatible with the drivers that are provided on the CD that comes with the card. So first things first, get the BIOS to 1.5 (the latest BIOS for the RAID controller).

Sadly, the next thing I did was to install 1.5 of the OSX Rocket RAID driver from the Highpoint site. At this point I could now completely kiss sleep goodbye. It just wouldn't, it would try but the system would just freeze and not go to sleep.

I knew what was next, I wasn't happy about it, but it was reinstall time. This was actually a blessing in disguise because the info here at tonymacx86 that Mountain Lion has Rocket RAID drivers built in is completely correct and upon installing 10.8 it saw my RAID 10 Logical Drives without a problem long with the other drives.

Next, and this was a CRITICAL step in getting sleep working with the controller was after OSX is completely installed and you've run your multibeast fixes is to run the command:

pmset -a hibernate 0

This stops OSX from making a memory dump when sleeping in case power goes so that it can restore from hibernation. Not worth it on a custo-mac as it just breaks stuff and if you have 32GB of RAM then you're also wasting a lot of hard disk.

Once I had rebuilt and issued that command I can now sleep my system every time without problem and it doesn't corrupt the RAID drives nor complain about any improper activity.

So, I do hope you don't have to re-install but in the end the only stable Rocket Raid drivers I found were the native OSX ones.

Excellent information, thanks for posting this. I have this card arriving soon, and this will be beneficial no doubt.

thanks for the info, buy my situation is before I upgrade my Hack to Maverick, everything worked great on 10.8.5, after up to 10.9 I got problem every time when start up my hack, the card bios can't load up the array, I need to unplug it to boot once the system, then turn it off, plug it back in and restart the system, then the bios will load it again! I guess it's may be related to bios version still on 1.0.

I'm don't know if I up the bios to v1.5 good to go, but I cannot afford if this could kill my array lost all data! So I question is there any option I can have now?

thanks in advance for any suggestion can help me out please ! ! !

I am having issues with my 2720SGL taking a RAID-5 array offline after coming back from sleep.

This is on Mavericks OS 10.9 (13A603). I have updated the 2720SGL to firmware 1.5. For reference, this is using a Gigabyte Z87X-OC motherboard. I have it in PCI bus number 2, which is a x4 slot. When I try it in other slots I cannot get the card to show up on boot (which seems odd).

The RAID is 5 Seagate 4TB drives in Raid 5. The card sees these in its POST screen and the Highpoint RAID management system (version 2.1.6.13.0408) sees the drive as healthy when I boot the system. I update the kexp for the RAID controller to note these as internal not external drives. The RAID controller shows up as a parallel SCSI device (like other peoples have it).

I have a filesystem on the volume and it shows up and works fine. I can reboot and it works fine. However, if the system sleeps, the MAC wakes up complaining about not removing drives without ejecting them, and the Highpoint raises alerts about the drives and the array failing.

My understanding is that this is because the controller does not gracefully handle losing power in the sleep mode.

One way I have succesfully worked around this is by disabling the array in the management interface before sleeping, then re-scaning for the array after waking the system up. This seems to work, although I sometimes have to scan, disable and then re-scan to get the array and controller to come up error free.

If there were a CLI for the card, this wouldn't be so bad, as I could script this to occur on sleep and wake.

The system profile already had hibernatemode set to 0, but I tried setting it off to see if that helped.

When the system comes back in a bad state after the sleep, the array cannot be easily recovered using the tool- rescaning the physical/logical information causes the drives and array to disappear from the management console. I'm going to try saving the config to a file and using the "Recover" option to see if that works. Having to reboot the system to get the drives online is frustrating to say the least.

Has anyone had any luck getting this card to work reliably after the system sleeps? Has anyone written a CLI for the highpoint cards (I am toying with hacking something together with a web library or curl)?

Is there a guide to how I might be able to possibly tell the system to continue providing power to that one PCI slot when in sleep/suspend state?

Thanks for any help you might have. If I can't get this to work, I may just try and see if I can get one of my multiport SATA cards to work, and try out ZFS-OSX or the like.

Played around with some settings and decided to try setting the hibernatemode to 3- doing that seems to have resolved the issue! I guess keeping the image resident in RAM either keeps the PCI bus powered, or the driver is maintaining the state in RAM not on the card (I bet the second is more likely).

I think the lesson is to try different hibernate modes until you get one that works.

Celeus, Thank you for this! I have a GAZ97X-UD7 with HighPoint 2720. It was having the same issue. "sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3" resolved the it! Thanks.