Possible issue - Server 2012 with dynamic disks

[andye]

I have an issue with restarting and shutting down - these can get stuck at restarting or shutting down. It is intermittent. With PrimoCache disabled I have not had it happen. I have a mixture of striped and mirrored and I believe it happened once when L2 caching was disabled.

I have just tried recreating the caches making sure I specify all the dynamic slices for a volume (two slices, one on each drive, for a mirrored or striped volume (two drives only)) L2 enabled on the striped volume - update ... after a couple of days testing this method has had no problems.

Any comments or suggestions ...

[andye]

After further testing it looks like it is essential to select all slices of any volume to be cached on dynamic disks. For example if you have a mirrored partition, C, then you need to select both portions of the mirror for caching.

If this is indeed essential (question for the developers) then this should not be a manual option with the possibility to get it wrong, but an automatic selection of all associated slices of a volume.

[Support]

May I have your cache settings? And how does your L2 device connect to the computer? by USB or SATA interface? Thanks.

[andye]

L2 - SATA (I believe that the issue also happened with the L2 cache off)
C: R/W 60 second cache latency 512 MB, 0 MB L2
E: R/W 60 second cache latency 1024 MB, MAX L2 (SSD)

[andye]

Update: The issue of being stuck on restart has reoccurred once since changing to selecting all segments for drives (change from stuck at "Restarting" occurring 2/3 attempts to about 1/8 attempts)