7960 Flashing lights on M2 Flexbay carrier

Hello,

if it's behaving like on a 7820, is normal. You would have 2 lights for each carrier. One with a symbol like a heartbeat on a medical machine , fix, and the other flashing ( disk access )

@mazzinia_​ The disk access lights are working when there is disk activity. Which is clearly normal. however, the lower lights which have the heartbeat symbol are continuously flashing in a regular, synchronised manner. This is the issue that concerns me. It did not occur when the BIOS was set to raid-on.

@BobL55​ I'm starting to think that depends. In theory the HB should pulsate like beating, but I think lot is down to bios design.

Take the now older 7820... I'm in ahci too, and the behavior is hb fix
On an older workstation, the raid controller has the hb flashing, as expected
On another workstation i've here, unix kind, the motherboard itself has an hb light and it flashes even if the workstation is powered off, to show all is ok.

Flashing should be the most correct behavior to show all is well, but it's also depending on design ( like clearly someone decided that on the 7820 in ahci , the light should not flash , while someone decided it should on the 7960 )

@mazzinia_​ Thanks for your input. I'd be interested to hear from other 7960 users or from a Dell source as to whether this is normal. I've Googled this and there is no information anywhere indicating what the expected behaviour should be. I would have thought there would have been a document somewhere describing the function of the two lights on the drive carrier when setting up the NVMe flexbays to show that the setup process has completed correctly.

I also have a Dell UltraSpeed Duo card installed on the same machine with two PCIe 4.0 cards. All four installed NVMe cards test close to maximum advertised performance. This is not the case when using the VROC controller where the maximum test speeds are around 6500/5500 for all cards (SK Hynix PC811, Samsung 990 Pro and 2 x WD SN850X).

@BobL55​ I do agree that some document would have been useful. I felt this when I put 2 sata drives in the 2 normal bays, expecting to see the HB light and the activity of the drive to turn on , only to be told by a dell tech that those lights for SATA units do turn on on the caddy only if in raid mode, otherwise is down to just the small white activity light under the power button.

Meanwhile the 2nd nvme bay, with a 2.5" U.2 enterprise ssd installed... has the HB light turned on, but the activity light always off