3ware and NTP

For some years, I’ve been paranoid enough to run RAID-1 on my desktop machine to protect against a single hard drive failure. Backups are to another drive on a separate controller.
A couple of weeks ago, I flashed the firmware on my 3ware 9650SE, rebooted, and the BIOS wouldn’t see the controller at all. ‘lspci’ under Linux showed the card, but nothing else – the 3w-9xxx driver in the kernel didn’t recognise it, nor did 3dm2 nor tw_cli. Strange – although it’s within the year’s warranty, so I’m RMAing it on Monday.
On a separate, slightly strange matter, I’ve had an Asus P5WDG2 WS Professional motherboard with some DDR2-667 RAM for a couple of years now. Sometimes the machine boots and it recognises the RAM as DDR2-667, and sometimes as DDR2-533. Why, I don’t know. Anyway, fiddling around in the BIOS to determine whether I had a dead PCI Express slot, I managed to turn on some automatic overclocking functions – things that I don’t usually touch.
The results were strange – over the course of 24 hours, my machine gained a whole hour. Naturally, this was going to be down to something I’d fiddled with, so I turned overclocking off and in the past couple of hours, the clock keeps the correct time.
Here’s a lesson for you – change one thing at a time and check it works 🙂