Such a thing as a limited number of drives a motherboard can see?

Hi all, i've been using unraid for a while now, without a problem - every time i run out of space, i just add another drive to the array, and we're back up and running.  However, this time i ran into an interesting issue.  First off, the relevant hardware:

Motherboard:

Asrock 970DE3/U3S3

http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/970DE3U3S3/?cat=Specifications

Attached to this is a cheapy 4-port SATA expansion card:

http://www.vantecusa.com/en/product/view_detail/391

I can post the specs of the individual drives as well as any other hardware, but those are the most relevant parts for this issue.  Up until now i've been adding drives without a problem, and had reached 10 of the 11 SATA ports filled with drives of various sizes.  (all 8 ports on the board full, and 3 of the 4 ports on the SATA expansion card filled).

As usual, i ran out of space, so i wandered down to the local MicroCenter and picked up another WD Caviar Green 3TB.  Unpacked it, installed it into the last open port of the SATA card, and fired the system back up.  "Error:  No Bootable Devices Found".  Odd.  I checked everything with the USB stick, and nothing had changed (i even went so far as to use that as an excuse to upgrade to the latest version of unRAID, still no dice).  I decided to go back to the last time it worked, so i unplugged the new drive from the sata port.  The system started right up and booted into unRAID like nothing ever happened. Out of curiosity, i checked the bios - it sees the USB as a bootable device.  Same if i hit F11 at boot for the one-time boot menu, the USB device is seen as an available option.  If i plug the 12th drive back in, the bios and the one-time boot menu don't see the USB device as an option anymore.

Thinking the SATA port may be bad, i shuffled a couple drives around so that the port in question was occupied.  System fired right up, no issues.  I also plugged the 12th drive into another system, and it was recognized just fine.  So i know all the hardware is functioning.

The question here is, where is the wall i'm hitting?  Is there such a thing as a maximum number of supported drives?  Is there a bios switch that i'm missing that suddenly disables USB booting when a 12th drive is plugged in? 

Any help you guys could give would be greatly appreciated - my almost-full server thanks you in advance!

Could it be that this card dose not support 3tb drives, or do you have other 3tb already?

If this is your first 3tb. Try putting it on mb sata port.

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Your link goes to a 6-port card; not a 4-port card.    Nevertheless, I suspect the issue is as asked above -- the card likely does not support drives > 2TB.

I presume, since you bought a 3TB drive (and also noted you had "...  picked up another WD Caviar Green 3TB ...")  that you already have at least a 3TB parity drive and have used some other 3TB drives.    Are any of these on the controller card?    If not, then swap one of your 2TB or smaller drives to the controller card and add your new 3TB card to a motherboard port.

Actually sorry, i mis-typed in the original post - it *is* a 6-port card, not a 4.  I always forget the external ports are there. 

Garycase is correct, i already have another 3TB card, and it's plugged into the controller card and is recognized fine, so i'm not positive it's the controller card.  As an experiment i moved the new 12th drive to be plugged into the motherboard (and swapped one of the existing drives to the controller card) and the same thing is happening - 11 drives, USB works, 12 drives, USB vanishes.

Go into the BIOS of the Motherboard and check on everything that has to do with drives and boot order.  Sometimes the BIOS will switch things around when it 'finds' a drive with a what it considers a bootable formatting (i.e., FAT32 or NTFS).

Check to see if there has been an updated BIOS posted and what problems and issues it addresses.

You should also check to see if that BIOS on that 'cheapy' SATA card has been updated.  Google the card (or its chip set) and see if anyone else has had a similar issue. 

This appears to be a SataI not a SataII card unlike what is printed on the box since it uses a Sil3114.  How do they get away with claiming it is SataII if it "Supports SATA up to 150MB/Sec" (from manual on page 3)?  Shouldn't it have to support up to 300MB/Sec to be SataII?

Also a 3114 is a 4 port chip and the manual also states that you have a choice of internal or external with a jumper setting.  So you were correct it is a 4 port card with 6 physical ports that you can choose 4 from.

This appears to be a SataI not a SataII card unlike what is printed on the box since it uses a Sil3114.  How do they get away with claiming it is SataII if it "Supports SATA up to 150MB/Sec" (from manual on page 3)?  Shouldn't it have to support up to 300MB/Sec to be SataII?

 

Bob, as I recall a sata I board will support sata II drives BUT only at sata I speeds.  However, (as I understand it ), sata I boards do NOT support sata III drives and a sata III board does not support sata I drives.  sata II drives and boards are the only ones that will work with everything. 

Sorry to bother but i have seen this problem. Try booting 11drives and hot plugin the 12th if it works the bios wont accept the quanty of drives and you are temporly up till you get a new mother board. I replaced a asus motherboard for a new super micro becouse of this.

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Thanks for the replies, all -

Thornwood, I'll try what you suggest - so i can just hot-plug the drive once unraid is completely loaded, stop the array and it will pick up the new drive?  Any potential downsides to doing this?

Also, what motherboard did you end up switching to?  The build i'm currently running is an "on the cheap" build, and now i'm gearing up to upgrade to a more robust build, so any advice is appreciated.

Sata drives are safe to hot plug in using the black cables. I am using 5rc16c so to me there is no down side minus if you restart it won't come up till you remove the drive. I got a super micro 9xsra of I remember correctly it has 14 on board sata and 4 pciex so plenty to upgrade later.

SATA drives are safe to hot plug IF you are using AHCI access mode (which you should be).    I wouldn't hot-plug if your BIOS is set to legacy IDE access (but this is unlikely for a typical UnRAID setup).

Hey guys, just wanted to let you know that the hot-plug method worked like a charm.  The drive is preclearing now, and it looks like everything should be golden.  That should tide me over until i can afford a new motherboard

Thanks everyone for all of your help!

No problem. Happy it worked.

Hate to resurrect the thread so soon, but it looks like i spoke too soon.  It looks like the drive detected and cleared properly:

(It's Disk 11 in that image)

It goes through the whole clearing process, but when it's done, the drive is no longer properly recognized:

When i click on the (sdk) in the dropdown, it churns for a second, then reloads the page with the drive unassigned.  If i unplug the drive and hotplug it again, it will recognize the drive, but then it wants to clear it again.  If i click the "log" button in the upper right, this is what it contains:

/usr/bin/tail -f /var/log/syslog
Aug 6 19:17:33 FeezFileServ kernel: sd 5:0:0:0: [sdk] 
Aug 6 19:17:33 FeezFileServ kernel: Result: hostbyte=0x04 driverbyte=0x00
Aug 6 19:17:33 FeezFileServ kernel: sd 5:0:0:0: [sdk] CDB: 
Aug 6 19:17:33 FeezFileServ kernel: cdb[0]=0x8a: 8a 00 00 00 00 00 03 b8 e4 80 00 00 00 a8 00 00
Aug 6 19:17:33 FeezFileServ kernel: sd 5:0:0:0: [sdk] Unhandled error code
Aug 6 19:17:33 FeezFileServ kernel: sd 5:0:0:0: [sdk] 
Aug 6 19:17:33 FeezFileServ kernel: Result: hostbyte=0x04 driverbyte=0x00
Aug 6 19:17:33 FeezFileServ kernel: sd 5:0:0:0: [sdk] CDB: 
Aug 6 19:17:33 FeezFileServ kernel: cdb[0]=0x8a: 8a 00 00 00 00 00 03 b8 e5 28 00 00 00 a8 00 00

If i leave the drive unassigned, i can start the array with the remaining drives no problem.

Any thoughts?

Unless there's a BIOS update for your motherboard that resolves this;  or a motherboard setting that fixes it [e.g. toggle any settings that change the boot-time behavior, such as "Plug  'n Play OS",  USB mode, etc.]  ...  then you're likely stuck with the 11 drives you have now until you upgrade to a newer system.

I'd save a few $$ and just bite the upgrade bullet.

Hi all, i've been using unraid for a while now, without a problem - every time i run out of space, i just add another drive to the array, and we're back up and running.  However, this time i ran into an interesting issue.  First off, the relevant hardware:

 

Motherboard:

 

Asrock 970DE3/U3S3

http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/970DE3U3S3/?cat=Specifications

 

Attached to this is a cheapy 4-port SATA expansion card:

http://www.vantecusa.com/en/product/view_detail/391

 

I can post the specs of the individual drives as well as any other hardware, but those are the most relevant parts for this issue.  Up until now i've been adding drives without a problem, and had reached 10 of the 11 SATA ports filled with drives of various sizes.  (all 8 ports on the board full, and 3 of the 4 ports on the SATA expansion card filled).

 

As usual, i ran out of space, so i wandered down to the local MicroCenter and picked up another WD Caviar Green 3TB.  Unpacked it, installed it into the last open port of the SATA card, and fired the system back up.  "Error:  No Bootable Devices Found".  Odd.  I checked everything with the USB stick, and nothing had changed (i even went so far as to use that as an excuse to upgrade to the latest version of unRAID, still no dice).  I decided to go back to the last time it worked, so i unplugged the new drive from the sata port.  The system started right up and booted into unRAID like nothing ever happened. Out of curiosity, i checked the bios - it sees the USB as a bootable device.  Same if i hit F11 at boot for the one-time boot menu, the USB device is seen as an available option.  If i plug the 12th drive back in, the bios and the one-time boot menu don't see the USB device as an option anymore.

 

Thinking the SATA port may be bad, i shuffled a couple drives around so that the port in question was occupied.  System fired right up, no issues.  I also plugged the 12th drive into another system, and it was recognized just fine.  So i know all the hardware is functioning.

 

The question here is, where is the wall i'm hitting?  Is there such a thing as a maximum number of supported drives?  Is there a bios switch that i'm missing that suddenly disables USB booting when a 12th drive is plugged in? 

 

Any help you guys could give would be greatly appreciated - my almost-full server thanks you in advance!

That card looks just like the Rosewill RC218 card. Only four ports can be used at any one time. You use the jumpers to configure it for which ports you want to use. I use several of these RC218 cards in my unRAID setups because they support port multiplier capable enclosures. SO in one of my unRAID setups I have seventeen drives attached to one of these cards with three, 4 bay enclosures and one, 5 bay enclosure.

I use four of these cards in total between my three unRAID setups.

I've not run into a limit of the number of drives that can be attached to the motherboard and these cards, but I have run into issues with certain configurations with this card and other cards. I had to move the cards around to different PCI express slots and use trial and error to see which combination works. In one unRAID I use two of the RC218 pci express cards, two other two port pci express cards, plus the six on board sata connections. But in that setup I only use two ports on each of the RC218 cards with eight drives attached to each card since it is an older MB and an older version of PCI express so it runs at half the speed of my other unRAID setups. So I needed to put half as many drives on each card to keep the speeds the same as my other unRAID setups when doing a parity check.

I have more than one of those PCI cards, so maybe i'll try sticking a second one in and move some of the drives to it.  I'm pretty cognizant of the fact that eventually i'll be looking for a new motherboard, i'm just trying to exhaust all my options before i have to explain to my wife why i dropped a couple hundred on a motherboard

I have more than one of those PCI cards, so maybe i'll try sticking a second one in and move some of the drives to it.  I'm pretty cognizant of the fact that eventually i'll be looking for a new motherboard, i'm just trying to exhaust all my options before i have to explain to my wife why i dropped a couple hundred on a motherboard

The are a number of BIOS upgrades posted up on the ASRock Website.  Have you updated to the latest one? 

Have you contacted the ASRock tech support group to see if they are aware of the problem?  They might have either a fix or a workaround...

Also on our good deals traid sell site some people are selling slightly used motherboards. Much cheaper than stores some times at least. Sorry the hot plug did not work.

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