Is Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 compatible with 3T drives?

I ran some tests and found that with the .21 firmware, that my SASLP was compatible with 3T drives.  But there have been various forum posts suggesting it is NOT compatible.  I went looking for something more definitive than my personal anecdotal experience.

I found THIS post/thread on AVS.  renethx, an AVS Gold Club Member with over 12,000 posts, confirms that firmware .21 IS compatible with 3T drives.

Later in that thread you will find an updated Windows driver that addresses a problem some users were having using this controller with 3T drives in Windows.  (This is not needed for unRAID but you might want to download it just in case you need it later)  Users are reporting that with this updated driver 3T drives work fine under Windows.

Hope this ends the debate.  If anyone has any evidence to the contrary, be it personal experience or documented somewhere, please post it here!

Using that driver, It does appear to work in windows 7/2008r2. the bios (.21 at least) also sees them as 3tb.

i have personally put 4 hitachi 3TB green drives on the same channel and they worked flawlessly as JBOD on my unraid server booting it to WINDOWS 2008r2 with the updated driver.

I also find it strange that the one thread is the only place in the world of google with that driver.

I emailed supermicro for an updated driver. i was told there is none and that it is not supported.

Then again, that could be the opinion of the one tech.

I have yet to get more then one 3TB to work in unraid on an MV8. as soon as i try to add 2, i get massive error count on both and the third wont start. it keeps saying "new drive found".  This could be my setup or me doing something wrong and someone else can get it right.

I do also get the same errors off the motherboard sata600 ports also so i suspect it could be me.

Any help would be appreciated.

Ok, Make a liar out of me....

I have no idea what my problem was...

New thumb drive with 5B8D would not take my 3TB drives! no matter what combo i tried on what motherboard.

I got drasticly irritated and....

I gutted Goliath, throwing away about 7TB of data.

I pulled all the drives out, formatted goliath's thumb drive, added 5B9, my pro Key and started all over.

No add-ons, raw unraid, 5beta9 and it fired up with 4x 3TB hitachi green drives on my MV8 (no other drives plugged in). 3 data and 1 parity (ill move parity to Mobo at a later date).

I copied some data to it and I'm computing parity. I'll let you know know how it goes.

I'll shove a few TB to it and see if holds parity for a few days. if so, Ill start adding more drives and add-on's back to it and see if it breaks again.

If its good. I'll pick up more of those $106 3TB drives from amazon.

I hope this test helps answer your questions...

EDIT: I just got 4 more 3TB drives. that $106 is to good to pass up...

at the worst, I'll put the 8x 3TB drives into an existing hardware raid6 freeing up 8x 2TB Sammy F4 drives for unraid...

PS. 25% done with parity and no errors.

Ok, Make a liar out of me....

 

I have no idea what my problem was...

 

New thumb drive with 5B8D would not take my 3TB drives! no matter what combo i tried on what motherboard.

 

I got drasticly irritated and....

I gutted Goliath, throwing away about 7TB of data.

I pulled all the drives out, formatted goliath's thumb drive, added 5B9, my pro Key and started all over.

 

No add-ons, raw unraid, 5beta9 and it fired up with 4x 3TB hitachi green drives on my MV8 (no other drives plugged in).

I copied some data to it and I'm computing parity. I'll let you know know how it goes.

 

I'll shove a few TB to it and see if holds parity for a few days. if so, Ill start adding more drives and add-on's back to it and see if it breaks again.

 

If its good. I'll pick up more of those $106 3TB drives from amazon.

 

I hope this test helps answer your questions...

Hope you didn't actually loose 7T worth of data!

But I do think whatever problem you were having did not have anything to do with the controller.

Please let me know if parity computes properly. 

Parity computed just fine. I added a 1.5tb cache drive and I'm adding a tb of data to the array.

I'll run parity again after that.

I'll post a syslog after the second parity check.

PS. I didnt "Loose" 7TB. I never put my unraid into full production. everything on it was also on some windows raid arrays that have not been turned on since i fired up my unraid. I just threw the duplicated data away to start over.

PS. I didnt "Loose" 7TB. I never put my unraid into full production. everything on it was also on some windows raid arrays that have not been turned on since i fired up my unraid. I just threw the duplicated data away to start over.

Whew!  Good news.

Looks like your off to a good (re)start!

Enjoy your array!

For some reason I did not get a syslog.

I wanted to post the entire build to end log.

I do have one i made today. it is a reboot last night to test "oops" for Madburg and then I computed parity again.

EDIT:

I should point out that parity was calculated at over 100MB/s in this combo.

Also, I guess I didn't throw away 7TB of data.....

I plugged the drives into my other unraid server and unraid saw all of the data on the drives and added it to the array.

I just have to mess with the share setting now.

Nice unexpected feature of unraid..

syslog-3tb-test.txt

A quick update to this thread.

One of my 3TB drives red-balled on me.

It was my own fault. I pulled the wrong drive tray from the server while unraid was running.

I thought I was pulling a spare drive and I pulled a production drive.

I thought this would be the perfect time to test parity rebuild.

I had not yet added all of my 3TB drives to my array yet. I still have several that are precleared and sitting in the chassis not yet added to the array (hence my mistake).

I stopped the array. Pulled the red-ball. Stuck a new 3tb in its place.

I then started the array in rebuild mode. It took about 10 hours to rebuild. partly because I was using the array while it was rebuilding.

I had zero errors.

I have now put the Red-ball back into the chassis and I am preclearing it again.

I'll also run a full smart check to make sure it is good.

I'll then use it as a spare or for "standby" for when I need more storage.