spasszeit

Also noticed that every time I hot plug a USB device the board emits a short beep sound. Makes me believe that the short beeps during post when USB ports initialize are nothing more than a feature of this board. And since this is not in the manual the "support" guy could not tell me if it's normal or not... they need to update their on-screen help scripts:-)

MvL, Yep, I read that review as well. The author of the review did a good job at it too. I took some measurements with a Kill-a-Watt tonight on my system, in case you and others are interested: Configuration: Motherboard - Supermicro X8SIL-F Processor - Intel Xeon X3430 RAM - Crucial 2x2GB CT25672BA1339 Unregistered ECC SATA Card - Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 Hard drives - 3x 500GB Seagate drives, 2x 320 Seagate drives (7200rpm I believe), 1x 2TB WD20EARS green drive Seagates are in the array, and the WD is outside the array for now. PSU - Corsair HX620W, rated up to 85% efficiency as per Corsair's spec sheet OFF - 4W Start - 235W (this is the highest spike I registered), then dropped off to 125W during post UnRaid boot - 139-141W UnRaid Booted - 95-97W, all 6 drives spun up All drives spun down - 66W

Aiden, No more issues with USB, and I haven't flashed BIOS yet. Been testing last night, this AM and PM. Works like a charm. I suspect that the issue was related to the initial inability to boot from USB. The post starts with SATA controller initialization, then USB port initialization, then hard drives, etc. What was happening there, I think, was that even when I was hitting DELETE (perhaps a bit late some time?), the system was trying to boot from USB and would get stuck there without taking me to BIOS. That's my impression. Ever since I got the system to boot from USB I did not see that 'hang' and I can enter BIOS with the USB keyboard just fine. As to the memory, I read lot's of feedback about how picky this board is about memory. I picked mine from the Supermicro's list of compatible memory and it worked without a hitch. Ran 10 cycles of memtest today and no errors. If yours is on the list of tested memory, you shouldn't have any issues. If not, let's keep our fingers crossed that you don't have any issues. Also, I tried booting the board with only one stick and it won't boot. Gives me a long beep, which means memory problem according to the manual. My other boards work with one stick just fine. As a matter of fact, my P5BVM-DO doesn't like two sticks, so I have been running it with just one 2GB stick.

So far so good. Looks like Level I test has passed successfully. Looking at the syslog I don't see any problems or compatibility issues. The good: - 3x PCIe slots can host 3x AOC-SASLP-MV8 card, along with 6 on-board SATA slots = 30 drives If one wanted, a total of 34 drives can be connected to this board when also utilizing the PCI slot. - IPMI, IPMI, IPMI! It's really useful, and it does work well. At least for me, as I know some have had problems with it. - ECC memory. Not sure how useful this is, but I want to believe that those occasional errors will be caught and corrected. - 2x Intel NICs. Don't need two now, but... 2 better than 1 I suppose. If one goes bad I can use the other one:-) - Not exceptional, but very decent power consumption. - Can take both Xeon and very affordable i3 CPU's. - On-board USB slot. No more worries that one of my kids may decide to toy with the flash drive The bad: - None so far, or see "the weird" I guess The weird: - Making this board boot from USB was a hassle. What worked was formatting the stick with HP utility and checking the "create a DOS startup disk". - The board emits 4-6 short beeps during USB port initialization. No description of these in the manual. Supermicro support has no comment on this. I asked in my email if this was normal, but they ignored this particular question. I surmise it is not normal. (edit: looks like this is a feature after all). Saw a post on another forum where someone had the same behavior, RMA'ed the board, and the new one did the same thing. Well, the USB flash works fine, so I am not too concerned about the beeps. - My USB keyboard sometimes is not detected so I can't enter the BIOS. PS2 keyboard works fine. Emailed Supermicro, they suggested flashing BIOS to the latest version. Will try that on the weekend. (edit: fixed, see below) Configuration: Motherboard - Supermicro X8SIL-F Processor - Intel Xeon X3430 RAM - Crucial 2x2GB CT25672BA1339 Unregistered ECC SATA Card - Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 Motherboard specs: Supermicro X8SIL-F - http://www.supermicro.com/xeon_3400/Motherboard/X8SIL.cfm?IPMI=Y 1. Intel® Xeon® X3400 / L3400 series, Core™ i3 & Pretium® processors with LGA 1156 socket 2. Intel® 3420 Chipset 3. Up to 32GB DDR3 1333/1066/800MHz ECC Registered DIMM / 16GB Unbuffered DIMM 4. Dual Intel® 82574L Gigabit Ethernet Controllers 5. 6x SATA (3 Gbps) Ports RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 6. 2 (x8) PCI-Express 2.0, 1 (x4) PCI-Express (using x8 slot), 1 32-bit PCI slot 7. Integrated IPMI 2.0 with KVM and Dedicated LAN 8. 7x USB (2 rear, 1 on-board, 2 headers) syslog-2010-08-25.txt

It sure is. I just logged into console and am in the process of checking out the features. I love it. So far no glitches, very smooth and quite intuitive.

That's interesting, Aiden. I have been following your experiences with the Atom board and, in despair, was actually contemplating downgrading to X7SPA-HF:-) I hope the X8SIL-F proves to be a winner. I will post my Level I and Level II testing experiences.

Great success!!! It finally booted into unRaid! What helped was formatting the flash drive with HP utility and checking the "create a DOS startup disk". Now the fun part begins. On to Level I testing.

After some extensive research and deliberation I went and bought a X8SIL-F, Xeon X3430, and 4 GB of ECC memory. Nobody seems to be using this board with unRaid, or a board with a similar chipset, so it was a risk on my part that I was willing to take as the board seemed too sweet to pass. Well, after 2 days of messing with it I am still not able to get it to boot into unRaid. I don't think it is a problem with the BIOS configuration as I can make it start Windows installation from USB. Besides, the BIOS does not seem to have many configuration options at all. It's not the unRaid stick either as I can get the unRaid load fine in my other PC. The error message is "Error Loading Operating System". Anyone has any clue what this can mean? Is it that unRaid may not have some files that support this particular chipset, Intel 3430? Anyone experienced a similar problem with a different board? Supermicro X8SIL-F - http://www.supermicro.com/xeon_3400/Motherboard/X8SIL.cfm?IPMI=Y 1. Intel® Xeon® X3400 / L3400 series, Core™ i3 & Pretium® processors with LGA 1156 socket 2. Intel® 3420 Chipset 3. Up to 32GB DDR3 1333/1066/800MHz ECC Registered DIMM / 16GB Unbuffered DIMM 4. Dual Intel® 82574L Gigabit Ethernet Controllers 5. 6x SATA (3 Gbps) Ports RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 6. 2 (x8) PCI-Express 2.0, 1 (x4) PCI-Express (using x8 slot), 1 32-bit PCI slot 7. Integrated IPMI 2.0 with KVM and Dedicated LAN 8. 7x USB (2 rear, 1 on-board, 2 headers)