Just wanted to thank this thread for all the great discussion that helped me with my decision.

 

I initially went with these ASM1166 cards (1, 2) , but both didn't get detected by my Windows machines ( 1 intel-based and 1 amd-based) for a firmware update. Returned them for a refund.

 

I then followed other recommendations on the thread to order cards from more reliable sources like SYBA even though they're a bit more expensive. Here's the actual JMicron JMB582 card I ordered. Decided to go with a 2-port card instead for lower power consumption compared to 4/6 ports. Can confirm that it added only 3 watts on idle. One word of caution though that upon installing the expansion on my Z390 UD mobo, it automatically turned off my SATA controllers upon reboot. A simple fix via BIOS did it and now everything is working smoothly.

 

On 12/26/2022 at 3:10 PM, luzankia said:

Because when I rolled back to my LSI, everything worked back after the rebuild on the same drive.

 

With the impossibility to send the 1166 back, lost for lost, I flashed the Silverstone ECS06 firmware on it but from a third computer and everything worked. (firmware ugraded from rev 2011 to 2111)

 

I launched a parity check to load the controller and it's running at an estimated speed of 120 Mb/s when it was between 30Mb/s and 360Kb/s before the firmware upgrade.

 

It's definitly slower then the LSI but in idle, I'm now at 25 Watts instead of 32 Watts.

 

EDIT : forgot to stop my dockers, I'm at >200Mb/s estimated speed in parity check.

EDIT 2 : Parity check finished and no probleme so far, power use between 23.3 and 24.5w in idle.

 

I definitely need to do this - my parity check on my ASM1166 sits at 30ish MB/s which I always thought was a bit slow and my server is eating power usage.

I tried to find the files on the Silverstone site but all I found is a zip file with an update tool and a 11080000.ROM from 11/01/2022
Where did you find the 2011/2111 versions?

When you launch the update utility, it will scan for compatibles peripherals and display the firmware version of the card it found.

I had to use two different computer to do the firmware upgrade, on the first one, the app would freeze after clicking the upgrade button every time I tried. On the second one, it took a couple of seconds to finish it.

Again, I took the risk to upgrade it because I couldn't send it back. The app look generic but you never know if it's not customised a little by silverstone as the spi field talk about unknown spi for the card.
In one line, it worked for me but nothing say it will work for without breaking everything.

Envoyé de mon S88Plus en utilisant Tapatalk

Thanks, yeah got it sorted now.

The silverstone firmware update is confusing as hell - the file names for the firmware don't match the actual version.  Takes a lot of googling to work out which is newest etc....

 

I found the file on https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/expansion-cards/ECS06/ - for anyone else wanting to try this it's helpfully called "Fix compatibility issue and support Intel 600 series chipset motherboard" 

 

I shutdown unraid, moved my card to my Windows 11 gaming PC, ran the firmware update and it worked fine

My card had come with 200529-000D-02 firmware version, flashed it to 211108-0000-00. 

I *think* mine was about 2 years old - it's hard to tell as I found an archive of loads of version numbers but there's no consistency in the version numbering at all.

 

Either way seems to work fine, did the upgrade last night and all my disks are still there this morning.
I'm going to write up a guide on my documentation site just in case anyone else is googling it like I was as there's not a lot of help out there  

EDIT: Oh I did also, same as you, see an increase in speed too when running a parity check!

Edited January 1, 20232 yr by PhilBarker

Good to hear.

Envoyé de mon S88Plus en utilisant Tapatalk

Just a quick warning.

Because i wanted a new faster controller card to replace my AAR-1430SA i grabbed a rather cheap (30€) Sata controller card with ASM-1166 chipset from Amazon. Okay they shipped a different model than it was advertised on the photos but okay, nearly all of the ASM1166 are unlabled etc. You can only differ them by the board Layout etc.

What i got was that here:

 

Using it resulted in kicked out drives etc. For gods sake with much help here in the Forum the situation was manageable.

I dont know if the card is faulty or if the model is crap, but at least i could return it to Amazon.

 

What i ordered now was a bit more expensive model, hopefully it works better:

https://smile.amazon.de/dp/B09K4WKHKK?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details

That can always be an issue with these cheap Asmedia and JMB controllers, the chips themselves are OK, but the build quality of that specif controller can just be bad, I once got a couple of Asmedia 1062 2-port controllers that would not go 5 minutes without UDMA CRC errors, just bad controllers, replaced them with equivalent Syba controllers and no more issues.

The firmware is a lottery too

I bought a card end of last year. The firmware was 4 years old. ASM1166

 

Since upgrading the firmware the speed has improved massively and it’s working fine with power management too 

I think getting a Firmware upgrade for an unlabled card is nearly impossible.

I mean if you want es good ASM1166 i think i would be a good Idea to buy a Silverstone ECS06, at least than you now the manufacturer.

50 minutes ago, darkside40 said:

I think getting a Firmware upgrade for an unlabled card is nearly impossible.

I mean if you want es good ASM1166 i think i would be a good Idea to buy a Silverstone ECS06, at least than you now the manufacturer.

 

Cheap copy here, upgraded firmware with the Silverstone firmware, zero issues

I will add that I did it too and that the silverstone flasher is, in fact an asmedia software.

Before upgrading I did too had kicked out drives ans since then, no problem.

Is there any guide how to check the firmware or where to get the updated?

 

Edit:

Okay to answer myself, simply grab the updater from the ECS06 Support Page. After Setting up a Windows PC and installing the Driver for the ASM1166 i was able to flash the FW

Edited January 8, 20232 yr by darkside40

Yeah it's easy to do just takes some piecing together of info scattered around

 

I've added a quick guide to my docs site just really for future reference
https://docs.phil-barker.com/posts/upgrading-ASM1166-firmware-for-unraid/

Thanks for that. I think i will make a similiar german Post on my Blog for future Reference. Would it be okay to use your pictures?

Btw i wrote a mail to Asmedia if it was possible to get Firmware Roms directly from them but they refused.

 

So its best to keep an Eye on Silverstone.

Yes of course

Thanks

Okay the second ASM1166 Card also goes back to Amazon. Same as with the first Cheap one. One Disk gets kicked out of the Array. changed the cables etc. nothing changed. Also tried the second x16 PCIe slot on the board. Mounted the old Adaptec i have no problems. Firmware was the newest on the card.

 

I dont know, seems that the ASM1166 does not like to play with my Gigabyte B460M D3H. Anyone tried that Board or Chipset before?

Now i have to rebuild that disk again. Argh.

23 hours ago, darkside40 said:

Okay the second ASM1166 Card also goes back to Amazon. Same as with the first Cheap one. One Disk gets kicked out of the Array. changed the cables etc. nothing changed. Also tried the second x16 PCIe slot on the board. Mounted the old Adaptec i have no problems. Firmware was the newest on the card.

 

I dont know, seems that the ASM1166 does not like to play with my Gigabyte B460M D3H. Anyone tried that Board or Chipset before?

Now i have to rebuild that disk again. Argh.

 

That's so weird

I don't have that board I have a Gigabyte A320

But I ordered a card from Amazon and it had the Marvell 88SE9215 chip. It seemed to work but I hadn't read this thread to see the warning.

Randomly it just seemed to power down and all disks connected to it vanished. They didn't get corrupted or anything they just disappeared and I had to reboot.

I sent it back and got the ASM1166 6 port version (it's an MZHOU card I have) and it has been bulletproof ever since.
Only issue I had was enabling power saving features but as said earlier after I upgraded the firmware it's worked perfectly with that too

I know that the Marvell Controllers have a bad reputation but the stone aged Adaptec AAR-1430SA i am using since more than 7 years is really bullet proof, even when using S3 Sleep etc.

 

So yeah its kind of a gamble. Maybe there would be a magical UEFi setting that would make the ASM1166 work, but if have no time to try.

 

1 hour ago, darkside40 said:

I know that the Marvell Controllers have a bad reputation but the stone aged Adaptec AAR-1430SA

It's mostly the newer ones, that Adaptec works very well, I have some myself, it's not on the list of recommended because it's a quite old  PCIe 1.0 controller.

On 1/8/2023 at 5:43 PM, darkside40 said:

Is there any guide how to check the firmware or where to get the updated?

 

Edit:

Okay to answer myself, simply grab the updater from the ECS06 Support Page. After Setting up a Windows PC and installing the Driver for the ASM1166 i was able to flash the FW

What about the C-States on the Silverstone PCI card? I bought a cheap 4-port card on eBay the other day. Unfortunately, I can only achieve C3 with it.

 

 

Edited January 16, 20232 yr by Roque

Currently running a Dell PERC H310 and a Dell H200 (both PCIe 2.0 x8) in IT Mode on my current setup. Both allow for 8 drives, each I have a total of 7 (SATA drives) connected to each right now, which is the maximum possible in the case I use.

I'm thinking about switching over to a case with 24 bays (plus 2x 2.5" internal drives), so I would either have to get another HBA (the board I'm looking at has 3x PCIe 4.0 x16 slots, so it would fit) or use an SAS expander. The question I'm asking myself is what is the best option for me here:

 

1.) H310  AND H200  AND another HBA; connect 8 drives each?

2.) H310 AND H200 AND an SAS expander; connect 16 drives to one HBA and 8 to the other?

3.) H310 OR H200 AND an SAS expander; connect all 24 drives to one HBA and ditch the other one? (or do I just aimlessly sacrifice bandwith here, if I have a second HBA on hand anyway)

 

What SAS expander should I be looking into, especially if I were to run all 24 drives off a single Dell H200/H310?

 

Drives currently are a mix of old and new 2.5" and 3.5" (all SATA3), ranging from 500 GB to 8 TB

 

CPU would be a Ryzen APU, so integrated iGPU and no need for a video card to use up a slot.

16 hours ago, Darkguy said:

What SAS expander should I be looking into, especially if I were to run all 24 drives off a single Dell H200/H310?

Any expander with the port you need, both the HP SAS2 and SAS3 expanders would work, Intel SAS2 or SAS3 expanders, the 24port SAS2 Intel expander mentioned on the 1st post would work with a single link from the HBA connected to 20 drives and the other 4 could be on the other HBA port, but not ideal for performance.

I am not in the market to change boards/case/CPU etc right now so I have been looking at these m.2 to SATA expansion cards (specifically ones using the ASM1166 chipset) to add storage to my array. I am currently on mITX (so only one PCIe slot) and cannot afford to give up my NVIDIA card to cover PLEX transcoding (my ASUS P11C-I with it's C242 chipset doesn't allow for iGPU passthrough).

 

Question 1: Can anyone tell me if there is any downside to having my two parity drives (currently run dual parity) on the expansion card vs the motherboard's onboard controller?

 

Question 2: Seeing reports about flimsy PCBs on these expanders, potentially being the point of failure. Would it make more sense to get an m.2 to PCIe riser card and use my existing ECS06? Cost is small enough with either option, just wanted the one that is the most reliable of the two.

 

Thanks for any suggestions/tips.

9 hours ago, 3560freak said:

Question 1:

Should be the same.

 

Can't really comment on #2, it would also depend on the actual controller you get, no name brands can be a bit of a gamble.