Fireball3

iirc, drives need to be on the mainboards controller for TRIM support. @johnnie.black can tell us more.

bjp999 you changed your nick?

@Paul_Ber Not sure to which price you refer to, but the rebranded LSI 9240-8i cards from IBM, DELL and Fujitsu are very competitive when it comes to costs. The only thing is, you have to crossflash em to IT mode. Check our wiki for other known working adapters. Maybe the trade section of the forum has something you're looking for? @Tuxtech The LSI SAS 9201-16i is often mentioned around here. Although pricing and availability is heavily dependent on your location. As the names suggests, you can hook up 16 drives on that one. I'm not up-to-date but expanders were not cheap also when I checked last time. Another option would be a second 8i card. Also, check the above link for alternative solutions.

OK, I see your point. Double checked that, and "scan user shares" was not enabled. I switched it ON and after I had watched my movie I went to the stats screen and checked RAM usage. All of it was "cached". As expected, that setting made a difference in terms of RAM usage. Now several questions arise: 1. If it eats up all of my (8GB) RAM I still can't be sure to have everything cached. It should cache only my "movie" and "shows" directories, not my backups so it shouldn't fill up the RAM like that. 2. Why does it use that much RAM. Does the "scan user shares" respect the "excluded directories" settings, or will it scan all shares? 3. Should I use the "user shares scan" instead of the drive-based caching? How to set that up? 4. What was the default settings of "scan user shares" in the unRAID 5 script? I haven't had issues with that.

Updated to the latest BIOS from 2013. Changes were related to USB. Tried the controller with the new BIOS but, no joy. No, nothing overclocked.

It's an ASUS M5A99X EVO. Tried all PCIe slots - forgot to mention that. I need to check for a BIOS Update. Maybe there is something available.

Lets go ahead with this story. I was busy the last few days so I hadn't time to continue fiddling. But now I did some extensive testing. The reason why I'm staying on 6.1 is because I know there is a working console-based preclear script. I use that to preclear my drives. For testing purposes though, I updated my test bench unRAID to the latest 6.3.5. Unfortunately without success on the matter itself. Added the pci=realloc=off to the go. No success. Next step, I've been going through the whole process once again - from scratch (apart from the card not being on it's original firmware). Then, I ensured to get the cards POST screen. I had a setting in that boards BIOS called "Option ROM messages". It was set to "keep current" (whatever that means). After setting it to "Force BIOS" (the only other option to choose) it shows the Avago BIOS POST screen. On that screen, all drives are shown. Success. But with unRAID loaded, no drives are availabe. So, partial success. Well, at least now I know the card is working. Now, let's plug that thing into another PC. Tadaaaa, Success. That works down to unRAID level. So there must be something in that ASUS M5A99X EVO board that keeps the controller from running nicely. Overall, not so nice but if it's just this board, I don't mind. Another thing that I don't like is the boot delay caused by the controller's BIOS we flashed. So, repeat the procedure and skip the BIOS. Note: When flashing both, firmware and BIOS to the card (7.NSH), I noticed that the "adapter reset" after the firmware is flashed will be successful. The firmware flash alone instead (6.NSH), will result in a reset error. Somewhat confusing...but, meh. OK, so I went back to the ASUS test rig, repeated the whole thing but without the BIOS. Then switched to the other PC again. Tested both fully populated SAS ports subsequently. All fine. The SBR I eventually used was A11. I'm attaching the syslog of the not working PC and the working one. Both running unRAID 6.3.5 Maybe somebody more knowledgeable has an idea how to get the ASUS working, or maybe somebody can use this for troubleshooting when having similar problems. For the moment I will leave the card as it is and see if I can use it in my productive system. After all, it seems the Fujitsu cards are xflashable, but this example proves that they are not that straight forward than the DELL or IBM cards. The flash may have run perfect, but you still don't know if incompatibilities stop you from going productive. I flashed a couple of DELL cards and never had similar problems. syslog_6.3.5_mptsas_reset_failed.log syslog_6.3.5_working_pc.log

LSI Corporation SAS2 Flash Utility Version 19.00.00.00 (2014.03.17) Copyright (c) 2008-2014 LSI Corporation. All rights reserved No LSI SAS adapters found! Limited Command Set Available! ERROR: Command Not allowed without an adapter! ERROR: Couldn't Create Command -c Exiting Program. LSI Corporation SAS2 Flash Utility Version 20.00.00.00 (2014.09.18) Copyright (c) 2008-2014 LSI Corporation. All rights reserved Adapter Selected is a LSI SAS: SAS2008(B1) Controller Number : 0 Controller : SAS2008(B1) PCI Address : 00:01:00:00 SAS Address : 5003005-..... NVDATA Version (Default) : 14.01.00.08 NVDATA Version (Persistent) : 14.01.00.08 Firmware Product ID : 0x2213 (IT) Firmware Version : 20.00.07.00 NVDATA Vendor : LSI NVDATA Product ID : SAS9211-8i BIOS Version : N/A UEFI BSD Version : N/A FCODE Version : N/A Board Name : SAS9211-8i Board Assembly : N/A Board Tracer Number : N/A Finished Processing Commands Successfully. Exiting SAS2Flash. How I did it, just to make sure I did something wrong. Booted in FreeOS and issued megarec -writesbr 0 SBR-A21.bin While your custom SBR didn't work at all, well at least we know the flashing of different SBR works, the A21.SBR shows the same results. Also no drives recognized. Pulled an unRAID syslog with the A21.SBR. It seems the controller doesn't reset when querried by the OS. To rule out general issues I plugged an H200 controller and ran unRAID. It detects drives as expected. syslog

@Jonny I just flashed a D2607 A11 with the toolset you put together. This is my result: LSI Corporation SAS2 Flash Utility Version 19.00.00.00 (2014.03.17) Copyright (c) 2008-2014 LSI Corporation. All rights reserved Adapter Selected is a LSI SAS: SAS2008(B1) Controller Number : 0 Controller : SAS2008(B1) PCI Address : 00:01:00:00 SAS Address : 5003005censored:) NVDATA Version (Default) : 14.01.00.08 NVDATA Version (Persistent) : 14.01.00.08 Firmware Product ID : 0x2213 (IT) Firmware Version : 20.00.07.00 NVDATA Vendor : LSI NVDATA Product ID : SAS9211-8i BIOS Version : N/A UEFI BSD Version : N/A FCODE Version : N/A Board Name : SAS9211-8i Board Assembly : N/A Board Tracer Number : N/A Finished Processing Commands Successfully. Exiting SAS2Flash. Yea, looks good, but unfortunately the controller is not detecting any drive on any port. It says A11-GS1 on the PCB. Attached is the original SBR dump. Any advice what I could try next? Also, could you try the command: sas2flsh.efi -l adapter.txt -c 0 -list My machine is locking up when I try to log. Instead i need to pipe the output into a file. "-c 0 -list" alone ist working for some reason... Could you also show me your output of e.g.: megarec -writesbr 0 SBR-A11.bin The last word is "success" but in between i get: Warning! IO Base address high. Currently not supported. Warning! IO Base address high. Currently not supported. O-SBR.BIN

Have you ensured that permissions are all set correctly? There is a 'newperms' command you could issue on source and target and give it another try.

OK, but if this was the case, all drives in that share would have to spin up, or not? I'm using the Total Commander file manager.

It seems cache_dirs doesn't cache properly. I noticed several times now that I have to wait for a drive to spin up until content of the share is shown. I thought that I'm running short on RAM, so I upgraded the RAM to have more capacity for caching. But when checking stats, a fair amount is still free. The server didn't perform any copying or other heavy duty task before. It was booted, served a show for the kids and then went idle. Somebody here to confirm this? How to troubleshoot this issue?

I have a couple of used controllers, crossflashed to IT mode. Card types are: Dell H310 Dell H200 Fujitsu D2607 Firmware is LSI P20.00.07.00 IT-mode. Ready for unRAID, just plug'n'play. Price per controller is 50€ + shipping + Paypal fee. Payment via Paypal or SEPA. Location is Germany, so I'm prefering EU buyers. Just because world shipping is expensive, risky and customs are a pita. Just send me a PM if interested.

If you have 4 cards in one server, it may be easier to use 16i cards. Else, yes use 9211-8i if you can have them for a reasonable price. Alternatively get the rebranded 9240-8i as tdallen suggested and crossflash em to 9211-8i. Check the hardware wiki for more info. See link in my sig.

There is also a toolset specific for the DELL cards which tries to make life a bit more comfortable. Either way will do.

OK, indeed a memory issue. Right after start of memtest everything came up red. Server is up again with some other RAM and the movies play just fine. Rebuild was successful. Will run a check against my backup server to see what those 80 errors during rebuild were about. The GUI says now: Last check completed on Sat 23 Sep 2017 12:04:28 AM CEST (today), finding 0 errors. Thanks for your quick help guys!

OK, got the syslog already but need to shutdown/reboot to pull it off the stick. Anything else I should get before rebooting? Will do a memtest afterwards.

Hey guys, I was running out of space and decided to upgrade one 1.5TB drive that was not so healthy either. During the rebuild it found 80 errors, I was able to see the GUI by that time. 2 hours before estimated finish of the rebuild, I fired up a movie but the one I chose was failing after 2 or so minutes. Tried another one and my Popcorn (media player) ended up in an unstable condition. Rebooted the media player and tried again, same thing. Well, I thought I check the issue on my PC. Browser said something about connection refused. Checked the shares and I noticed it was laggy when opening the directories. A few seconds later the server did not respond any more. Well, I thought by myself to let the rebuild finish. Sleep will powerdown the rig after finishing and tomorrow everything will be OK. This morning I checked the server status and found it up and running. Still not accessible via GUI nor shares nor telnet. Plugged a keyboard and a screen to grab the diagnostics. Fist issue, see attached pic. What should I do now? The server is still running and waiting for yor input.

It looks like Avago is now Broadcom. They took the opportunity to get rid of some old tech data on their site. A similar controller (not to say the same) is the 9210-8i https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/host-bus-adapters/sas-9210-8i#specifications They specify a air flow of 200 LFM http://www.comairrotron.com/airflow-unit-conversion

OK, I guess fdisk will come up with the same story. Presuming the crossflash went OK, I don't believe it's the controller. You could also try another PCIe port and/or another board. Maybe drop it into the unRAID and see what happens.

Welcome to the unRAID forums. You have a typo in there "Fujitsu D2067 A11". It's D2607. Haven't heard of this kind of issue yet. P20.00.07.00 is working fine. Maybe one of your old drives is causing trouble? Have you tried increasing drive count step-by-step? Where do you check drive presence? In the card BIOS or fdisk -l? Maybe another cable, just to rule that out?

Hi, welcome to the unRAID forums. I cannot download the mediafire link at this location, but if you took it from a post in this forum, it probably contains an IT mode firmware. The unRAID OS, which is the main topic in this forum, needs controllers in IT mode. Your original firmware seems to be IR mode. Maybe this is the reason of your disappeared tape drive. You should search the LSI/Avago site for an up-to-date IR firmware for your controller and give it a try. Also, firmware flashing is best done on DOS.

Not sure how 15 hot swappable drives could fit in there - at least not 3.5" drives. They don't state if the drives are hot swappable on the various configurations shown on their site, but from the pics you posted i see room for 10x3.5" drives plus maybe some 2.5" in the center .

Welcome to the unRAID forum! Did your setup work with freenas? Maybe you have to map the share as a windows drive?

Correct, "movies" will be the exported share in your network. e.g. "server_name/movies" You can find exhausting examples about split level settings around here.