Gizmotoy Posted March 29, 2011 Author Share Posted March 29, 2011 I had a chance to fire up 5.0b6a again, so I checked on the status of my two data drives by assigning them to their slots. It looks like they were both recognized as 4k-aligned (They're WD EARS), which is correct. I didn't start the array, though. My controllers are already on the way, so I'm just going to wait for those to show up here in a day or two. Link to comment
lionelhutz Posted March 29, 2011 Share Posted March 29, 2011 That's could be considered a good thing. If you did start running 5.0b6 you wouldn't be very likely to go back to 4.7. Peter Link to comment
Gizmotoy Posted March 29, 2011 Author Share Posted March 29, 2011 That's could be considered a good thing. If you did start running 4.5b6 you wouldn't be very likely to go back to 4.7. Peter Did you mean 5.0b6a? I liked 5.0. It has some features that will be nice, but nothing that's a must-have feature for me. Well, aside from SATA controller support. I have an UnRaid server to maintain data integrity. If there's a risk of losing all my data, as happened with the MBR issue mentioned, why bother at all? When the developer tells you not to trust the betas to production servers I'll listen, no matter what great features I may miss out on. Hopefully 5.0 comes sooner rather than later, but I'll try to make due with add-on cards until then. Edit: I have a bit of an update. It appears this board had a UEFI issue that prevented it from entering AHCI mode. It listed AHCI as an option, but you couldn't select it. MSi is giving people who contact their support team a new UEFI version that will enable the AHCI modes. I gave this new firmware a shot, and booted up 4.7 hoping that perhaps it might work. Still no luck. My controllers are coming in tomorrow, so I'll check back in once I have those up and running. Link to comment
lionelhutz Posted March 30, 2011 Share Posted March 30, 2011 Yes, 5.0b6, just wrote the wrong thing. No one has had that issue once they did the first start. Peter Link to comment
Gizmotoy Posted March 31, 2011 Author Share Posted March 31, 2011 Time for an update. As luck would have it, all three of my controller cards came today, even the one that I wasn't expecting for a few more weeks. I have some mixed news. The good news is that controller cards appear to work in the PCIe x16 slot. My Syba SD-SA2PEX-2IR controllers from Monoprice both work without issue. My server is back up and running on 4.7. Then I tried the eBay JMicron board. The PC won't even boot if it's installed. It doesn't matter what slot, and it doesn't even matter if its the only card. If it's inserted, the boot process fails and the machine turns itself off. I don't know if the card is defective, if the motherboard doesn't like it, or what. The much larger problem is my read/write speed is abysmal. I went from 30-40MB/s reads down to 8MB/s. Same drives, same cables. No parity check running. The LAN chipset is a Realtek RTL8111E, and I've seen other posts by people on the board with this chipset. I ran the UnMenu hdparm -tT script, and all three array drives pulled 111MB/s, which is what they did on the old hardware. Is my network card a problem now, as well? Note that in the syslog I had to release/renew my IP address using: /etc/ifplugd/ifplugd.action eth0 down /etc/ifplugd/ifplugd.action eth0 up syslog-2011-03-15.txt Link to comment
PeterB Posted March 31, 2011 Share Posted March 31, 2011 I went from 30-40MB/s reads down to 8MB/s. ... The LAN chipset is a Realtek RTL8111E, and I've seen other posts by people on the board with this chipset. Ouch! Since having problems with Realtek network interfaces, many, many, years ago, I have avoided them like the plague ever since. I have always felt confident with Intel and Netgear. Link to comment
Gizmotoy Posted March 31, 2011 Author Share Posted March 31, 2011 Yes. Not great. 8MB/s is not acceptable. I need to stream Blu Rays. It says it's connected at 1000Mbps too. Anything I can check out or do? Do I have to give up on 4.7 and try the beta? Realtek has full source Linux driver for this chipset, but I'd have to compile and get it into the kernel myself. It was just updated a few days back. I assume that's not possible with UnRaid? I read the process for FreeNAS and it's pretty straightforward, but none of the commands work on Unraid. http://www.realtek.com.tw/DOWNLOADS/DOWNLOADSVIEW.ASPX?LANGID=1&PNID=13&PFID=5&LEVEL=5&CONN=4&DOWNTYPEID=3&GETDOWN=FALSE root@Hyperion:~# ethtool eth0 Settings for eth0: Supported ports: [ TP MII ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes Speed: 1000Mb/s Duplex: Full Port: MII PHYAD: 0 Transceiver: internal Auto-negotiation: on Supports Wake-on: pumbg Wake-on: g Current message level: 0x00000033 (51) Link detected: yes root@Hyperion:~# ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 6c:62:6d:ea:36:f1 inet addr:10.0.1.100 Bcast:10.0.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:2410648 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:3277723 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:761723140 (726.4 MiB) TX bytes:59498950 (56.7 MiB) Interrupt:31 Base address:0x6000 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:380 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:380 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:51438 (50.2 KiB) TX bytes:51438 (50.2 KiB) root@Hyperion:~# Edit: Something extra strange going on here. After a reboot, I'm getting 50MB/s transfers. I like that, but I'm a little more concerned about what happened to cause the really slow transfers in the first place. Edit2: And about 10 minutes later it's back to 1MB/s. What the heck is going on here? I noticed a Fatal Error in my syslog regarding my APC UPS not being connected right about the time the network took a nosedive. I plugged it in, and transfer speeds are back to 50MB/s. Does that make any sense at all? Could the UPS driver interfere with network traffic? Link to comment
lionelhutz Posted March 31, 2011 Share Posted March 31, 2011 The APC daemon apcupsd has network capabilities to share the UPS status between multiple machines so it's possible it starts doing something on the LAN trying to get or share the UPS status. You should be able to just comment out the add-on installs in the go file or remove it using unMENU (I'm assuming this is how it was installed) if you don't want it used at the moment. Peter Link to comment
Gizmotoy Posted March 31, 2011 Author Share Posted March 31, 2011 Interesting. I didn't know that. Maybe it does some blocking calls on the driver or something. Anyway, it looks to be OK when the UPS is plugged in. In reality, I simply forgot to plug it back in after I installed the PCIe cards. This board/CPU combo is insane. I was at 125W with 4 drives spun up on my Athlon X2 5200+ and NForce4 system. Swap those out for the Core i3 2100 and H61, and under the same conditions I'm at 48W (even with 2 SATA controllers I wasn't using before). And it's a *lot* faster. Very impressive. Link to comment
Joe L. Posted March 31, 2011 Share Posted March 31, 2011 Is my network card a problem now, as well? What do you see when you type: ethtool eth0 ifconfig eth0 Link to comment
Gizmotoy Posted March 31, 2011 Author Share Posted March 31, 2011 Is my network card a problem now, as well? What do you see when you type: ethtool eth0 ifconfig eth0 I have the results of these tools up in post number 31. Nothing looked out of the ordinary, to my eyes anyway. Link to comment
PeterB Posted March 31, 2011 Share Posted March 31, 2011 I think that I'm clutching at straws here, but I've never really understood this 'Port: MII' setting. As far as I remember, from days long past, MII (Media Independent Interface) is a hardware interface specification relating to physical connections to a fast ethernet (ie 10/100) network. However, I've rarely seen an MII port, and never on a PC. Does ethtool still report Port : MII after the reboot, when you are achieving 30MB/s transfers? My Intel network interface doesn't support MII, only TP (Twisted Pair). It may be worthwhile trying to force the port setting to 'TP' (with ethtool). Something like 'ethtool -s eth0 port tp' Link to comment
bcbgboy13 Posted March 31, 2011 Share Posted March 31, 2011 When someone buys the latest motherboard that just came into the market they should be prepared to deal with all sort of issues and they should check out the motherboard maker weekly for new BIOSes. This is especially important for the latest Intel chipsets as the new silicon may have been rushed to the marked without extensive testing. Make sure you update to the latest BIOS, load the "default" settings, then change the SATA settings as you did before and disable anything that you wont use - serial and parallel ports, audio, IDE controller if you do not plan to use PATA drives, etc... Link to comment
Gizmotoy Posted March 31, 2011 Author Share Posted March 31, 2011 Does ethtool still report Port : MII after the reboot, when you are achieving 30MB/s transfers? Yes, I'm getting 50MB/s even with the port listed as MII. It's been stable at that rate across reboots as well. I think it just had something to do with the UPS control. It's been perfect since I plugged it back in. To try those, I used ethtool to force it to TP. unRAID beeped as if it was restarting the networking layer. I checked ethtool again and it still says it's using MII. It looks like it doesn't want to use TP. There's a tool called mii-tool that you can run from the command line for MII-interfaced LAN chipsets. It shows successful negotiation at 1000base-T-FD. So, if it weren't obvious from my transfer speeds, it must support GMII. When someone buys the latest motherboard that just came into the market they should be prepared to deal with all sort of issues and they should check out the motherboard maker weekly for new BIOSes. This is especially important for the latest Intel chipsets as the new silicon may have been rushed to the marked without extensive testing. Make sure you update to the latest BIOS, load the "default" settings, then change the SATA settings as you did before and disable anything that you wont use - serial and parallel ports, audio, IDE controller if you do not plan to use PATA drives, etc... Maybe I've misread your tone here, but you act like I'm not doing any of that. We determined the probable cause of the ethernet problem. I verified the SATA controller works in 5.0b6a. I talked with MSi CS and got them to acknowledge there's a UEFI update that adds the missing AHCI support. I tested the update and verified it works. I identified and posted the exact UEFI settings that allow the SATA controller to work with 5.0b6a, and verified 4.7 lacks the same support. You make out like I'm a slacker here, but this thread has turned into a how-to guide on how to get this board working with unRAID. Because of the promotion, the motherboard was about -$30 compared to the price of the processor alone, so at better than free it was worth giving it a shot. The promotion's ongoing as they're now substituting the similar P23 board (more legacy ports, no HDMI, one more PCIe x1 slot to replace a the P33's legacy PCI slot), so other people can still get in on this if they want. I've had fun tinkering, appreciate the help everyone's provided, and ended up getting the thing fully functional at least for anyone wanting to use 5.0. Link to comment
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