March 10, 201214 yr Okay, I purchased a Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SAT2-MV8.cfm years ago. I bought it because I thought one of my motherboards had PCI-X onboard and wanted an 8 port card. However I've not needed the extra ports and the card has sat in a box - until now. I have an older P5B-VM-D0 board http://www.cpu-upgrade.com/mb-ASUS/P5B-VM_DO.html and a Supermicro C2See board http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Core/G45/C2SEE.cfm. The Supermicro board was the one I THOUGHT had PCI-X onboard but today popping it open I see nothing that appears to match my expansion card. Likewise squinting into the bowels of the Asus box I'm not seeing slots that look compatible. Now I *think* I can use this in a standard PCI slot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI-X as this card appears to be a "universal" 64bit card but a good sized portion of the card and slot would be hanging out of the back of the PCI slot. Before powering up a machine in this state I thought I'd ask here first! Will this work and what sort of performance hit will I be taking? Am I right that neither of these boards will allow this card to run full speed? I could swear when I bought one of these boards it had some funky features that cost me more but would lend to greater expansion down the road I have a small 2port PCIe card (ARC1200) that will get me by for now but I figured while I was in this Supermicro box I would go ahead and max it out - perhaps not! In the end I want to be able to support a total of 15 drives per machine maximum but I'm taking my time getting there. I'm also pondering moving to hardware that will allow 3TB drive support and thus fewer drives. I don't think either of these boards or my SATA cards will currently allow this but it's in my plans so comments regarding that are welcomed too. Thoughts?
March 10, 201214 yr Author Okay digging around I've found the controller card forum - duh! Not sure why my searches didn't find it but this post http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=12404.0 seems to indicate that the card is also PCI compliant! Good thing, the ARC-1200 card is giving me grief and this means I can yank it out for now. In the end I want both the 2port and the 8 port working together if possible but I don't have to have them both right now.
March 10, 201214 yr Yes, that card can run in a PCI slot. it will have degraded performance during rebuilds, parity checks or accessing multiple drives (more then 2) at once. For day to day use it should be fine. the SASLP-MV8 would be a better choice, but you have this one already so you might as well use it or re-sell it.
March 10, 201214 yr Author Thank you! I've installed it and it's clearing the new drive now. Only one drive attached for the moment and honestly I don't need super fast performance as this is mainly for serving up video and storing backups. Will this card support 3TB drives and if so does anything else need to be done? I didn't think unRAID supported these but see folks buying them. I'll swap mobo if I must in the future...
March 10, 201214 yr Thank you! I've installed it and it's clearing the new drive now. Only one drive attached for the moment and honestly I don't need super fast performance as this is mainly for serving up video and storing backups. I honestly have not checked on that. the SASLP-MV8 will for sure. I beta tested them a long time ago. Will this card support 3TB drives and if so does anything else need to be done? I didn't think unRAID supported these but see folks buying them. I'll swap mobo if I must in the future... You are better off swapping cards. the SASLP-MV8 will work in any PCIe 4x or better slot. for now you should be fine. just make sure your Parity and Cache drives are on the motherboard ports.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.