New build using ASRock M3A785GXH

Centurion 590 (Have Antec Twelve Hundred on order)

CORSAIR CMPSU-850TX

ASRock M3A785GXH/128M BIOS 1.70

AMD Athlon II X2 245 Regor 2.9GHz

G.SKILL Ripjaws 4G F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL

Monoprice 2 port SATA PCIe cards (wound up taking them out)

Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

3 x Supermicro CSE-M35T1

3 x Samsun 1.5G echo green

Planning to expand.

In the end it is up and running, syslog is attached. Note that perity check did pretty good "sync done. time=17806sec rate=82283K/sec". During this time two drives were connected to the MV8 and one to a mobo port. However I did have problems along the way which i will explain in hope that it might help someone else some day. I suspect they are all related to mobo BIOS compatibility problems.

One last detail, this board has 3 - 16x and 1 - 1x PCIe slots. I confugured the 16x to be 8x, 8x and 4x.

1. My original intent was to start with 2 port SATA cards and later get some Adaptec 4 port. The 2 port cards caused me nothing but trouble. With the main board SATA ports set to AHCI and a one of the 2 port cards installed the system would not boot nor would it let me into the BIOS setting. To get back into the BIOS setting I had to remove the 2 port card.

2. Changing the SATA ports to EIDE worked, sort of. In this config unRAID could only see 4 of the 6 SATA ports. This is one thing I can not blame on the BIOS.

3. Changing the SATA ports to RAID worked but might have cause another problem, read on.

4. I managed to get 12 ports recognized by installing 2 port cards in all 3 16x slots. However if I installed just one card in the 1x slot the system would skip right over the card BIOS for it. It even ignored a card installed in one of the 16x slots. Since I have no other 1x PCIe cards I could not try anything else in the 1x slot.

While I was messing arround with this Lime Tech came to the rescue by releasing 4.5.3 so I quicly ordered up a MV8 card and while I was waiting for it ran a preclear on all 3 drives connected to mobo ports configured as RAID.

5. Got the MV8, installed, updated the USB drive to 4.5.3 and all was good, but that only gave me 14 ports and I had 15 trays. So I installed on of the 2 port cards into one of the 16x slots. Now when trying to boot unRAID is would get through about 2 1/2 lines of dots loading bzroot and then give me an "out of memory" error. So out came the Monoprice card and life was good again.

6. I changed the main board SATA ports from RAID back to AHCI and spread out the drives. Finally ready to start the array. But one more problem. I got this error on both drives even though the preclear finished just fine. Could this have been because the SATA ports were configured as RAID when the preclear ran? The other difference was that the the preclear ran with version 4.5.1 but I did not try to start the array until after updating to 4.5.3.

Mar 17 20:42:49 Tower emhttp: disk2 mount error: 32

Mar 17 20:42:49 Tower emhttp: shcmd (20): rmdir /mnt/disk2

Mar 17 20:42:49 Tower kernel: REISERFS warning (device md2): sh-2021 reiserfs_fill_super: can not find reiserfs on md2

Anyway, after reading a bit about this error, I decided to just let the initial parity build finish and then format the drives. Now life was really good.

To tidy up I ran another parity check which can be seen in the attached log. This is where I am at now.

Got a bigger case on the way, will order a second MV8 card in April (spent too much money in the last few weeks) and will eventually add a 4th drive bay. I'll post an update when I can test with 2 MV8 cards installed.

In the end I would not recommend this mobo. I got it because it had 3 16x slots, got high marks and was only $94 back when I thought I would need 3 Adaptec cards to be able to get to 20 ports. Now two MV8s and 4 mobo ports will get you there. Guess I should have procrastinated a little longer before starting this project. Probably would have been a lot smoother process.

Later

Jerry

syslog-2010-03-18.txt

Mar 17 20:42:49 Tower emhttp: disk2 mount error: 32

Mar 17 20:42:49 Tower emhttp: shcmd (20): rmdir /mnt/disk2

Mar 17 20:42:49 Tower kernel: REISERFS warning (device md2): sh-2021 reiserfs_fill_super: can not find reiserfs on md2

Turns out this was a DA newb thing. It is perfectly normal. After running the preclear the drives are really empty, no reiserfs file system. This little detail is perfectly clear in big red letters in the instructions, you have to format the drives after you start the array.

Asrock are one of few companies that have very good after bios  support woth end users. if you take it up with their supports, tehres a good chance they can email you a modified bios to allow all the cards to init.

generally pcie 16x slots are designated for vga configuration, hence theres no real effort put into making them work with cards other than that. gigabyte also have this problem with their P45 range, they outright refuse to add bios code to make raid cards work, saying its the cards fault and theres nothing they can do (ive been over this with them, problem siolved by getting another brand P45 board).

generally pcie 16x slots are designated for vga configuration

Do you think this might be why my rig won't resume from S3 sleep when I have drives connected to the MV8 controller? I had posted details over in the PCIe MV8 thread of the hardware forum but have not read any posts from anyone saying that their system does or does not sleep/resume properly with drives connected to an MV8 card. I would hate to replace a mobo just to try and get sleep/resume to work and then find out it was a driver problem.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3382.msg28924#msg28924  end of page 8

Except for the sleep resume problem everthing is working perfect so long as I don't plug a Monoprice 2 port card in any slot, not even the x1 slot. I am expecting a second MV8 later today so I will be able to test having two of them plugged into this board. Assuming it works I will have 22 SATA ports, which is more than enough.

Second MV8 card arrived. Intalled it and everything is working fine. Currently have one drive on each MV8 and one plugged into the mobo. Running a parity sync. There are some ugly error messages in the log when something tries to load a second copy of the MV8 driver but they don't seem to be causing any real problem. I would not be at all surpriesed if adding a third MV8 would work but have no idea what to do with 30 SATA ports in one system, my 22 are just fine. Going to do few more preclear cycles and then it will be ready to serve it's real purpose. As I wrote before suspend/resume does not with the MV8s but I don't know what to blame for that.

syslog-2010-04-01b.zip

I just discovered that installing a second MV8 created a problem that when I soft power off the system it restarts all by itself after a second or two. To stop it from automatically powering on I had to disable "PCI Device Power On" in the BIOS. Now, of course, WOL does not work at all. This problem persist regardles what slots I put the two cards in. I'll be contacting ASRock about this one.