I had a 4bay eSATA hard drive box, but needed to add another. On top of that, I wanted to move the user accounts from my machines to a central point so that my wife (and soon to be kids) can login from any machine in the house and see their desktop, etc... so I pulled my old 2x1.8G5, bought OS X Server and got it all setup.
I haven't set up the user management stuff yet because the business critical part (serving files from the 2 4bay eSATA drive boxes) still isn't working- and business comes first!
I used to have the first drive box connected to my 2x2.0G5 via a Sonnet Tempo card and it ran without a hitch. I just assumed I could buy 2 of those (one to control each hard drive box) and they could serve up the files on all 8 drives without a problem. I went to buy 2 more cards like I already have, and lo and behold they're discontinued. Replaced by a new model, but those are now $300 a pop...
So I bought 2 of the Lycom 4port eSATA cards from CoolDrives.com where I bought the hard drive boxes. Problem is (I found out after the fact), they don't really run very stable on PCI, but apparently they run great on PCI-X. Problem is my Server is a dual 1.8 which has only PCI. Uh oh.... so I returned the cards.
I then bought 2 Seritek 1vE4 cards from Firmtek. Thought that would do the trick. I just popped the cards in (without hooking up the drives) to make sure they were seen by the system and there didn't seem to be any issues... everything looked great.
I powered on the first drive box, and all of a sudden I'm getting pop-up messages saying: "Seritek/1VE4 in SLOT-2: SATA Configuration Changed; (finalize all changes (connecting/remocing devices before closing this window)."
After I hit "done" the messages go away, and everything seems ok. Well, until I try and mount the volumes attached to the server, or read from them, or write to them. It's all very slow in response. Ie, you connect to the server, pick the volume you'd like to mount- then wait 15-20 seconds before it shows up in Finder on the local machine. Huh? (Even the Lycoms did this part instantaneously)
I started poking around on the Server, and noticed that it appears as though one of the CPUs is constantly pegged at 100% (I saw this via MenuMeters, and verified it via Activity Monitor). The process name is "kernel_task", user: root, CPU: 100% (+/-2%).
I know just enough to be dangerous in setting up this Server, but now I'm getting in over my head... would something on or associated with these two new cards be causing this "kernel_task" to hammer a CPU and eat up all it's cycles? Is there anything I can do try and track down what is causing this problem?
Anybody have any other recommendations I should try? (I've also posted this over in the OS X Server discussion forums on support.apple.com , but I've had no replies to help yet.
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