Vibe

Home Run! After erasing the bios on both cards the system booted without any issues and unRAID immediately recognized all drives. The only thing I needed to do was re-assign my cache drive. This is absolutely perfect and will serve my needs very well. I can't thank you enough johnnie.black for your suggestions and guidance, and SSD for the education on PCIe speeds. It's members like you both that help make unRAID a wonderful operating system! Thanks again - I hope I can return the favor!

I've made some progress - both LSI cards have been flashed to firmware version 20.00.07 (and bios 7.39.2 which I disabled). I'm getting a similar bios error so I will go ahead and erase the bios to see if this fixes the issue (thanks for the reference to your post johnnie.black). When I erase the bios - Is it possible to re-flash the card at a later date to utilize the bios again? (e.g. if I ever decide to sell the cards due to an upgrade). Or is this a "one-time" shot? Thanks again!

Thank you johnnie.black - I greatly appreciate the information. I've seen numerous comments about bios version 20 - but thought that they only pertained to cards that were not natively in IT mode. This is great to know - my knowledge is growing in baby-steps I will definitely try this over the weekend - thank you again!

Well...the plot thickens I tried installing the second LSI card in the x4 PCI slot only to receive the following error message: MPT BIOS Fault 10h encountered at adapter PCI (07h,00h,00h) Press any key to continue... What is strange, however, is that both cards work fine in the main x8 slot - no issues at all. It is only when I add both cards to my system (regardless of the order) that I receive the same error message. I have a feeling my motherboard will not accept two cards. During the process of troubleshooting I did disable the Boot Support for both cards. I did some further research and found many references to resolving the matter by flashing the bios/rom for these cards (for the non-IT versions). However, since they are both SAS9201-8i cards they are already in IT mode. I reviewed the unRAID support page for Crossflashing Controllers but none of this appeared to be relevant in my case. I was also not able to find bios information specific to the 9201-8i (only the 9201-16i). Would anyone mind looking at my attached LSI Card Screenshot and let me know if this bios is considered outdated? I don't want to risk damaging the card if the bios is fine and my motherboard is the culprit. If this is an old bios that should be updated - can someone recommend the bios version that I should be using? I greatly appreciate any suggestions! As an aside, I have found a few used/refurbished AMD 990fx motherboards that presumably have dual x16 and/or x8 support. If it does turn out that my motherboard does not like having cards installed - I may be better served going this route. Thank you again for any suggestions!

Perfect - I was hoping this would be the case. Thank you both again for your help and suggestions - I greatly appreciate it!

Hi johnnie.black - thank you for your reply. I didn't realize that the south bridge shared the connection with the onboard SATA ports - this is very good to know. I read your very helpful (and appreciated) post HERE for information about SATA/SAS controllers. With what you have mentioned, is there any standard practice for unRAID (e.g. regarding hardware) to utilize 15 storage drives (1x parity + 14x storage) and then add a two or three drive cache pool?

Hi SSD - thanks so much for your reply, I greatly appreciate it. I didn't realize that the second card would work in the second PCIe x16 slot if it only runs at x4 - this is great news. I always thought the number of lanes that a card utilized would determine the slot requirement. I'm currently only running one SSD drive on one of the motherboard SATA ports so considering the speeds you mentioned I should be set with my standard SATA drives. I will definitely try installing the second card tomorrow to see how this will work out. Thanks again for your insight and information!

Hi everyone, Recently I picked up a pair of LSI 9201-8i HBA cards from a friend after he upgraded his system. I was hoping to use both in my unRAID server that uses an Asus M5A97 R2.0 motherboard. Soon after I realized that my motherboards' PCIe configuration won't work with two x8 cards since one PCIe slot runs in x4 mode. This being the case, can anyone recommend an AMD AM3+ motherboard that runs both PCIe slots in x8 mode - which would allow me to use both cards? The other option I can follow is to use a spare IO Crest 2-port card + one LSI card - but I'd rather use both LSI cards and save the motherboard SATA ports for an SSD cache pool. I greatly appreciate any suggestions - thanks!

Thank you BobPhoenix - I greatly appreciate it. I see what I did wrong - I mistakenly thought that bjp999's version (preclear_bjp.sh from the mediafire.com link) had the modification for v6.2 already. However, after doing a file comparison with preclear_disk_15c.sh that you pointed out, I see where the required change needs to be made (line #968). I am also seeing the changes added for notifications. In the meantime I am trying one more attempt using the default gfjardim-0.8.9-beta script to test a new hard drive I received yesterday (currently pre-read at 50% @ 194MB/sec). If this fails I will I will try the versions you mentioned (with modification on bjp999's script) to see if I am successful. If I can get this to work as intended, the convenience will be a tremendous addition to a fantastic script. Thanks again for steering me in the right direction!

Hi everyone, I am in the process of trying to preclear two new HGST 4TB drives and can confirm the same issues. Since I am also in the process of upgrading my main system from v5.06 to v6.3.5, I decided to try out the new plugin system for unRAID 6 using a "trial" version that is running on a different server. The system boots just fine, recognizes the hard drives, and the plugin appears to have installed correctly. I have not added the drives to the array and was attempting to preclear both at the same time and later individually. When I attempt a preclear with the default gfjardim-0.8.9-beta script, one drive made it through the initial pre-read but stopped at 12% during zeroing. The second drive only made it through 86% of the pre-read (it's running slower and may have some issues). The preclear came to a hault and the CPU was running at 100%. As per BobPhoenix's recommendation above, I then tried using bjp99's script (bjp999-1.15b) by renaming/moving it to /flash/config/plugins/preclear.disk/preclear_disk.sh, and also copied the included readvz file to the root of the flash drive (/flash/readvz). I actually tried with both the original readvz as well as the one with bjp999's script. After a reboot the option to use bjp999's script was available within the preclear dialog. However, after starting a preclear (individual drives or both together), the status was not updated and only the message "starting" was displayed. I will try to run bjp999's script manually to see if I have better success.

Thank you Joe L. and prostuff1 for you replies and assistance - greatly appreciated. I will definitely keep an eye on this drive - and will compare the results to the other two drives that I have (same WD Caviar Black 1.5TB). Before the most recent version(s) of the Preclear script I used to use my cell phone to capture the results. I will take a look at these to see if there has been any change with the Spin_Up_Time attribute as when I first cleared the drive. Good to know this one isn't on the fritz - at least I hope so . Thank you both again for your time and assistance!

Thank you Joe L. for an outstanding script - using a second computer as a test box/clearing server makes adding new drives to unRAID an absolute breeze. Yesterday I added a new Hitachi 5K3000 drive to my system (upgraded a WD Caviar Black 1.5TB) - everything went smoothly as usual. I then used the Preclear script to clear the WD Caviar Black, and ended up with a report that highlighted the Spin_Up_Time attribute (something I've never seen highlighted in a preclear report before): ========================================================= ** Changed attributes in files: /tmp/smart_start_sda /tmp/smart_finish_sda ATTRIBUTE NEW_VAL OLD_VAL FAILURE_THRESHOLD STATUS RAW_VALUE Spin_Up_Time = 40 40 21 near_thresh 15000 Seek_Error_Rate = 100 200 0 ok 0 Temperature_Celsius = 117 132 0 ok 35 No SMART attributes are FAILING_NOW 0 sectors were pending re-allocation before the start of the preclear. 0 sectors were pending re-allocation after pre-read in cycle 1 of 1. 0 sectors were pending re-allocation after zero of disk in cycle 1 of 1. 0 sectors are pending re-allocation at the end of the preclear, the number of sectors pending re-allocation did not change. 0 sectors had been re-allocated before the start of the preclear. 0 sectors are re-allocated at the end of the preclear, the number of sectors re-allocated did not change. ======================================================= The report shows no issues with sector re-allocation - but appears to show the Spin_Up_Time attribute to be near the threshold. I searched in the forum and on Google but didn't find much information on whether this result should be of concern. I read somewhere that this could be the result of the power supply - but the server I cleared the drive on is healthy. Should I be concerned about the longevity of the drive itself?