Any special trick to 3 MV8 cards?

[derekos]

So I maxed out at 16 drives in my Norco 4224.  I have two MV8 cards and everything is fine.  I bought a third.  Plug it in and when the system reboots, unraid can't find lots of drives.  I take the third mv8 card out and all the drives show up in unraid fine. 

 

I put the third MV8 card back in and hit CTRL-M to make sure INIT 13 is disabled, but I can only toggle between two controller cards.

 

Am I missing something or should I RMA the third MV8 and get another?  Should I plug it into a different box?  Do I dare to swap its PCI slot with one of the working MV8 cards?

 

I would grateful for any help.

 

Thanks!

[derekos]

So, just as a follow up to this- I got a new MV8 card to make sure the other wasn't bad.  Same problem.  I am going to play with the PCI slots and see if my PCI slot is bad.

 

[DoeBoye]

Thanks for the update! I'm very  curious to see how this ends up .

 

I'm asssuming you are referring to the PCI-E card AOC-SASLP-MV8 when you say "MV8", and not the older PCI-X AOC-SAT2-MV8, right?

 

If so, have you considered trying another vendor? There is lots of good reports in this forum on the m1015 PCI-E card. Perhaps there's a limit to how many supermicro cards will work together?...

[derekos]

Yes on both.  It is the PCI-E AOC-SASLP-MV8 and I did buy a m1015 on ebay - it just arrived today, but I think I need to put it in a different box and flash it.  I also think I will need slightly longer cables by the look of it.  I will update this thread in a bit.

 

Thanks!

 

[DoeBoye]

Excellent! I look forward to your results!

 

[bcbgboy13]

Always wonder why people will use 3 card to get to 24 drives in a Norco case;

 

2 controllers - 16 drives - just add four SFF8087 to SFF8087 cables.

 

The motherboard usually have 6 ports. Add a cheap 2-ports PCIe x1 controller and two reverse breakout cables and you get your missing 8 ports.

 

 

[DoeBoye]

Always wonder why people will use 3 card to get to 24 drives in a Norco case;

 

2 controllers - 16 drives - just add four SFF8087 to SFF8087 cables.

 

The motherboard usually have 6 ports. Add a cheap 2-ports PCIe x1 controller and two reverse breakout cables and you get your missing 8 ports.

 

Not all boards have 6 sata headers. Mine does, but a lot of older boards (especially if they were re-purposed and there was no need in the original build to have a bunch of sata headers) will not.

 

Also, a quick search on newegg shows almost 25% of AMD boards sold today still don't have 6 ports...

[bcbgboy13]

Not all boards have 6 sata headers. Mine does, but a lot of older boards (especially if they were re-purposed and there was no need in the original build to have a bunch of sata headers) will not.

Also, a quick search on newegg shows almost 25% of AMD boards sold today still don't have 6 ports...

 

If they do not have the 6 SATA onboard ports then I am more than willing to bet that they wont be able to support the three PCIe x4 controllers at the same time.

 

And if they are that old they should not be used with someone precious data - the boards a few years ago (6+) were not made as today's ones.

 

And last what is the percentage of AMD boards with 3+ PCIe x4 min slots on Newegg 

[DoeBoye]

If they do not have the 6 SATA onboard ports then I am more than willing to bet that they wont be able to support the three PCIe x4 controllers at the same time.

 

And if they are that old they should not be used with someone precious data - the boards a few years ago (6+) were not made as today's ones.

 

And last what is the percentage of AMD boards with 3+ PCIe x4 min slots on Newegg 

 

21%! have 3 or more x4 controllers .

 

That said, you make a good point re: 3 pcie controllers. They would be more scarce on lower end boards that have less then 6 sata ports.

 

However, the point I was making was simply that there are certainly people out there using boards with less then 6 sata ports, but 3 4x pcie controllers.

[bcbgboy13]

However, the point I was making was simply that there are certainly people out there using boards with less then 6 sata ports, but 3 4x pcie controllers.

 

Not willing to consider defeat, aren't you. 

 

I am almost sure that you wont find any recent AMD based motherboard with two or more PCIe x4(or larger) slots and less than 5 SATA ports and the missing 6th is eSATA on the back panel.

[DoeBoye]

I am almost sure that you wont find any recent AMD based motherboard with two or more PCIe x4(or larger) slots and less than 5 SATA ports and the missing 6th is eSATA on the back panel.

 

Agreed! However, I am sure that there are people still running systems with less then 6 sata ports and more then 2 x4 pci-e slots.

 

Keep in mind, I never disagreed with your first statement. The way you suggest is exactly how I have my system set up: 2 8-port cards, one sil3132 2-port card, and 6 sata headers.

 

My initial response was to your question:

"Always wonder why people will use 3 card to get to 24 drives in a Norco case;

and I suggested a plausible and entirely likely scenario where someone would require 3 8-port cards...

 

 

[EDIT] Just for fun, perhaps OP could tell us why he is going the 3 card route?

 

[derekos]

Okay, so I finally had the time to work through all of this. 

 

A recap:  I have a Norco 4224 with a x9scm-f-o and two MV8 cards that are running just fine with UnRaid running under ESXi.  I use the onboard SATA ports for data store, cache drive and some misc. VM drives that do a lot of read/write activity.  So, I needed to add another MV8 to turn on the remaining two backplanes in the NORCO.  My x9scm-f-o was running BIOS 1.x (not 2.0a)

 

Problem: When I added the third MV8 card, the MV8 Card Bios only showed 2 controllers.  Booting up unRaid caused unRaid to loose a lot of drives.  Removing the third MV8 card fixed these problems and everything worked as expected. 

 

I purchased a new MV8 thinking that perhaps I had a bad one.  But, the new MV8 had the same problem.  I double checked that all the MV8s had the same revision stamped on their board.  I swapped PCI slots in many different configurations - same problem.  Whenever I add a third MV8 there are problems with unraid dropping drives. 

 

Solution:  I gimped out and bought an M1015 - and after updating the x9scm-f-o bios to 2.0a using IPMIView / Virtual CDROM (instead of a thumb drive); flashing the M1015 on the x9scm; re-configuring ESXI UNRAID VM for new PCI and re-doing MV8 hack, I have a working solution.

 

Advice:  Buy the M1015 to begin with and get a SAS Expander.  So much easier. 

 

Second thoughts:  I ought to have updated BIOS to 2.0a and tried the third MV8 to confirm the BIOS was not the problem.  I ought to have re-configured UnRaid VM PCI devices by removing ALL of them and re-adding them each time and applying the MV8 hack - this did not occur to me until after I added the M1015.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[MyKroFt]

I know this is a older thread - but I am in the same boat, trying to add a 3rd card - reason is I need to pass thru some of the MB stat ports via xen - but its all of nothing - MB has six - only need 4 to fill my case and wanted to use the last 2 for SSD for VM stuff outside of the array.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Myk

 

[MyKroFt]

Got it figured out - bios dont display 3rd card on boot up - but when unRAID loads - card activates and sees the drive attached to it.

 

so to set them up, you can only have 2 at a time to be able to get into the CTRL-M setup, once that is done - the rest just happens

 

Myk