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 Would anyone mind looking at my attached LSI Card Screenshot and let me know if this bios is considered outdated?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 Frank1940 for the information. I just did some further reading after your post and learned that my battery backup doesn't provide the sine waveform that you mentioned. Very interesting stuff. I don't have many power outages anymore, but may plan on upgrading to something that does provide this feature. A friend of mine also mentioned issues he has experienced due to power supplies dying on servers he manages (Linux but not unRAID). For this reason he has implemented using dual power supplies. Hi bjp999 - I certainly appreciate your perspective. The same friend I mentioned above jokes about the batteries on his UPS having an "invisible timer" that determines when it's ready to be replaced. He's suggested that he can add the day to his calendar for when he needs to order a new one - and they are not cheap. I began using unRAID years ago when storage on my Linux home server I built (software raid1) grew beyond 250GB. I never had any issues with data corruption when the power went out - very reliable storage indeed (despite the operator). Once I moved to unRAID and experienced the same reliability and the ability to easily increase capacity I was hooked.

This is very good to know - I can just imagine the issues with a power failure on a cache pool. After a power failure several years ago I did buy an APC Back-UPS 1300 (battery backup) which has been working with the APCUPSD pkg. However, since then I have read that there is a difference between a UPS and a battery backup. Would this be sufficient with BTRFS?

Perfect - Thanks so much Squid. I have a couple SSD drives that I haven't been using so now they will have a new home. I greatly appreciate your taking the time to answer my questions!

Thank you Squid for your reply - I greatly appreciate it. Of all unRAID users, if you're fully confident with XFS, my concerns are no longer an issue! I do have multiple back-ups of critical data, which is definitely good advice to follow. Interestingly enough I have never had any issues after power failures with unRAID 5. However, after moving to a new home and experiencing the first one, I quickly recognized the necessity of having a UPS. I did have a power supply fail on me - but after a typical parity check all was just fine. As far as my last question regarding using a Cache disk/pool for Docker storage - this would not negate the ability to continue writing directly to mounted disks would it? Thanks again for everyone's help!

Hi Frank1940 - I greatly appreciate the information. I have read about the slowness with writes on full disks (ReiserFS) and have noticed this myself to a degree. After reading about the developers murder conviction I can see why there would be limited interest to continue. The bug that cropped up in the past was also very concerning - I would have been extremely frustrated had I made the upgrade at that time. I too will probably make the full jump to XFS as I have the time and free drives. I will definitely follow your example and keep track during each stage. I am currently pre-clearing two 4TB hard drives on a "trial" system with that goal in mind. Sadly one drive may have some "issues" as it is making a repetitive noise every 5 seconds or so, and is pre-reading at 40MB/sec slower than the other (both same HGST 4TB NAS). I may be using Amazon's return policy. I completely agree with your sentiment about a UPS. After losing power to a storm a few years ago, the next 8 hours were a "nail-biter" when power was restored and my server was doing a parity check. Luckily I was not writing to the disks when this happened - I'm not certain if that would have had a different outcome. However, for the price and security - it is definitely a smart thing to do. When I make any changes I will definitely follow your recommendations regarding testing the procedure. Thanks again for guidance!