mikester

I was planning on using raw drives instead of virtual drives, so hopefully that works. Would you be willing to share your modified kernel with me?

So, what's it going to take to get this working? From the previous posts, it sounds like you are limited to 4 drives because UnRAID won't recognize the emulated SATA drives. What do we need to do to get around this limitation - a new driver added to the kernel? I really want to get this working, and am willing to do whatever I can to help, but I am a Linux noob, so I'm not sure where to start. If someone can help me get it up and running, I am willing to share our work with the community in the form of step by step documentation, sharing the VM file, etc.

I didn't know I was running that fast to begin with. For anyone interested, this is on an Abit AB9 Pro with a 3 GHz Celeron and 1 GB of RAM. This is a sweet motherboard - 9 onboard SATA2 ports plus 1 external eSata port. I'm currently running a Seagate 7200.10 500GB SATA2 drive for the parity, and 5 Western Digital 500GB SATA2 drives for data. The drives are spread out between the 3 separate onboard SATA controllers.

I tried this tonight - didn't seem to help (although I can't complain to begin with). This is on Unraid 4.0 with a 500GB SATA drive with 16MB cache. root@Tower:~# blockdev --getra /dev/md3 256 root@Tower:~# dd if='/mnt/disk3/DVD/Apollo 13/apollo13.iso' of=/dev/null 14701724+0 records in 14701724+0 records out 7527282688 bytes (7.5 GB) copied, 91.4494 seconds, 82.3 MB/s root@Tower:~# blockdev --setra 2048 /dev/md3 root@Tower:~# dd if='/mnt/disk3/DVD/Apollo 13/apollo13.iso' of=/dev/null 14701724+0 records in 14701724+0 records out 7527282688 bytes (7.5 GB) copied, 90.8642 seconds, 82.8 MB/s

I've been running a WHS box alongside my Unraid server for about a month now. For storage and redundancy, Unraid is head and shoulders above WHS. The best feature of WHS is the backup feature - that was worth the cost of the software alone. I also use it to host the My Movies database, since the newer versions require MS SQL server. I'm glad you posted this article though - after Christmas I was thinking about moving all of our digital photos to the WHS box so we can give family members remote access to view our pictures. I think I'll hold off on that until they fix the data corruption issue, though.

Directron has them: http://www.directron.com/p5bvmdo.html They're a great company. I've bought thousands of dollars worth of parts from them over the years, never had a problem.

1) What I mean is that for the Intel and JMicron controllers, they each have a setting in the BIOS called "SATA Mode" which can be set to IDE, AHCI, or RAID. For the Silicon Image controller, the only options are RAID and IDE. From playing around with the settings, it appears that the Silicon Image and Intel controllers can be recognized in IDE mode, but the JMicron controller must be in AHCI mode for UnRAid to see it. I think I saw in another thread here that this is a limitation of the Linux drivers. 2) When I was playing around with the Asus P5B-E, it specifically said in the BIOS that the AHCI mode for the JMicron controller only applied to the SATA devices, and that ATA devices would be in IDE mode. If what I read about the JMicron driver only supporting AHCI is correct, that would explain why the ATA drives are not detected. 3) I tried using a single LAN port at a time (and disabling the other port in the BIOS) and it still only works for LAN1. 4) I've tried every setting in the BIOS I can find related to USB, and nothing seems to help. I don't think it's my USB key, because it was pretty speedy with the other 2 motherboards I used. I think I saw on Abit's forum that there is a BIOS update available. I'm usually hesitant to flash the BIOS unless I am having major problems, but maybe I'll give it a shot while the board is still new (so if I brick it, I can return it to Fry's).

Please add the ABit AB9 Pro to the list.

Ok, I decided to give this motherboard another shot, and it works! I had swapped it out for an Asus P5B-E, and I had the same problem with it not booting off the USB key. After I solved the problem for the Asus (had to do syslinux with some switches set on the command line - search the forums for more info), I thought maybe the problem affected all of the Intel 965 chipsets, so I picked up another AB9 Pro to give it a shot. Here are a couple of notes to keep in mind when working with this motherboard: 1) There are 3 different SATA controllers on board, for a total of 10 SATA ports! 9 are internal, and 1 external. All of the SATA controllers work in UnRAID. I set both the Intel and JMicron controllers to AHCI mode. I think the Intel will work either way, but I know from using the P5B-E that the JMicron only works in AHCI mode. The Silicon Image controller only works in IDE mode, which works fine with UnRAID for that controller. 2) The IDE ports are NOT recognized by UnRAID. I think this is because they are handled by the JMicron controller, and the Linux drivers only support that controller in AHCI mode (which doesn't apply to the IDE ports, even when you set the AHCI option in the BIOS). I think this will be a common problem with newer motherboards, since Intel has dropped IDE support from their newer southbridges. If you need a mixed system, you can always add in a PCI controller card (although when I did this it dropped my parity sync rate by 25%, so no thanks). 3) The board comes with dual gigabit lan ports, but at least on my board only the LAN 1 port worked. This is strange, because both ports appear to be Realtek devices, which are supported well in UnRAID. Perhaps I just have a defective one on my board - maybe others can comment when they try this board if both LAN ports work. 4) USB boot is a little slow - it takes about 10 minutes for my Sandisk Cruzer 256MB to boot up. I've seen this on other boards I've tried, with the boot taking anywhere from 3-10 minutes. It just seems to be luck of the draw with how they implement the BIOS. Fortunately, I rarely find myself rebooting my UnRAID server during normal operation, so I can live with this. Overall, I give this board two big thumbs up. If you are putting together an all-SATA UnRAID system, this board should be at the top of your list, along with the Asus P5B-E. They are about the same price locally, or even better if you order the Abit from Newegg right now with the $30 rebate. But the ABit gives you 2 extra internal SATA ports. Performance was about the same for me - with 6 SATA drives spread out between all the controllers, I get parity sync rates of about 57MB/s on the ABit and 59MB/s on the Asus.

During the parity sync it topped out at 59MB/s. This is with 6 drives also - a Seagate 7200.10 500GB for the parity drive, and 5 Western Digital 320GB drives. One thing I did was spread the drives over 4 different controllers (2 built in and 2 add-in cards) to keep from saturating any single bus - hopefully that will help keep the performance up as I add drives. My old motherboard (Asus P5PE-VM) topped out at 22 MB/s. After seeing these results, I'm convinced the bottleneck was the PCI bus, since 4 of my SATA drives were plugged into a Sil3114-based SATA 150 PCI card.

Bummer. I was about ready to just return the motherboard and go back to my old one, but I decided to check the performance first. I removed the 2 IDE drives from the array, and my performance doubled during the parity check, so I think I'll keep this motherboard. One of the IDE drives is brand new, so I can just exchange it for a SATA drive instead. The other one I'll probably put in my main workstation for some extra storage, and if Tom ever fixes the problem I can move it back to my array.

Did you ever get this problem resolved? I am having the same issue - neither of my IDE drives show up in Unraid. I would hate to have to return this motherboard and go back to my old P5PE-VM, but I need those IDE drives to work.

Seasonic S12 600w. It's expensive, but well worth it. Tom's hardware did a torture test of power supplies a couple of years ago, and the Seasonics were one of only a few that survived without seriously malfunctioning (some of the cheaper ones even went up in smoke when they put them under heavy load).

Well, I tried everything I could think of, but I just couldn't get this motherboard to boot off the USB flash. I ended up returning it and ordered an Asus P5B-E. It has 2 fewer ports for the same price, but it's been proven to work with Unraid, so that's worth something.

So it sounds like my best performance will come from spreading out the drives across different controllers on different buses? I just ordered a P5B-E, and I have a 2 port PCI-e SATA controller and a 4 port PCI SATA controller. So it seems like if I distribute the drives across all 3 controllers, I should get the best performance, correct?