TA-958: When Third Party Drive Errors May Occur
Drives may go offline or report errors in operating system and RAID error logs, when certain 3rd party drives are installed in an Intel® Server Backplane AXX6DRV3GEXP or AXX4DRV3GEXP. The issue is only seen when the drives run at SATA 3.0 Gb/s, and does not occur at 1.5 Gb/s.
The SAS expander chip on Intel® Server Drive Enclosure AXX6DRV3GEXP and AXX4DRV3GEXP experience an undesired flow-control behavior when connected to a SATA disk drive running at 3.0 Gb/s. Drives operating at 3.0 Gb/s may not receive proper data or SATA flow control and may result in a timeout error. There is no timeout at 1.5 Gb/s. This interoperability limitation of the SAS expander with SATA disk drive is currently seen on Western Digital’s RE3 series SATA drives.
Technical Advisory 958 
File Name: TA0958-02.pdf
Size: 19,886 bytes
Date: June 2011
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