Want to Move UnRAID to Another Motherboard

[PhilH]

I can't find the CPU temperature threshold settings in the BIOS. I must be overlooking something simple. Help.

 

 

 

This setting is usually in the bios setting (system health) or something similar. It lets you set the temperature that the alarm goes off at. Under system health it will also show you the CPU temp. and your CPU fan speed in rpms. Let us know if this helps.

 

Phil

[Joseph Clark]

An update:

 

I still don't have a solution to the problem of the mobo warning wail. I've tried numerous times to call tech support at Asus, but no one ever answers the phone. It's always been busy. I tried to log on to their support forums, but I never get the final piece of the puzzle - an email that allows me to verify that I'm registered. They say they'll send me the email, but it never comes.

 

I've tried parity checks with the port multipliers and without. The IDE cache drive that I'm using doesn't seem to affect the parity check speeds at all, so I think I'll be OK using it instead of buying a SATA drive for cache.

 

The bad news is that parity check speeds are awful, with or without the PMs. Even if I use just the mobo SATA controllers, without the PMs, I'm only getting about 20MB/sec. The drives are a real hodge podge (Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor, WD), but they're all 500GB (or 1.5TB), 7200rpm SATA drives. With 15 drives in the system, it estimates about 20 hours for a parity check. Not good.

 

Staggering the drives does make a remarkable difference in the estimated parity check completion times, reducing the time by about 1/3. The first time I did a parity check estimate, it guaged it at over 28 hours. That's with 13 500GB data drives, 1 1.5TB data drive and a 1.5TB parity drive. I've let the parity check run for at least an hour, since in the past it's been pretty close to accurate for a check after that amount of time.

 

I have to assume, since I get this error sound from the mobo, that whatever is causing the problem is a likely suspect to be causing the awful performance as well. I'm very frustrated, though, that I can't get Asus to find out what this error sound indicates.

 

[WeeboTech]

Please post a syslog.

 

Did you get the ABIT motherboard or an ASUS?

 

Did you review the hardware/health settings in tbe BIOS to make sure there is no heat issue (thermal slowdown).

 

>> Staggering the drives does make a remarkable difference in the estimated parity check completion times, reducing the time by about 1/3

This is really good news.

 

Have you tried doing a parity check with a smaller amount of drives?

 

I know on my system, the older 500GB drives seem to slow down the parity creation/check.

Also from what I've seen, the parity create/update is slower then just a parity check.

 

 

Re motherboard wail.

Suggestion. Erase the CMOS and start again.

Have you flashed a recent bios. (I think I'm at 22)

 

>> I was concerned about using both Sil3132 ports, if they share the same bandwidth.

Are you using the internal SIL3132 port and the external SIL3132 port or another SIL3132 controller?

[Joseph Clark]

I will post a syslog ASAP and check the system health in BIOS. Kinda busy, so this is lower priority for me.

 

I meant Abit, not Asus. Most of my boards have been/are Asus - just a brain cramp. It's Abit I haven't been able to get hold of. (The only other Abit board I've owned is the one I'm replacing this one with - the Abit IC7 Max3.)

 

I did a parity check with 6 data drives (ICH) and the parity drive (on the internal Sil3132 port). Check time was still about 20MB/sec. Interesting that the parity create time is different than the regular check. Do your remember what the parity create MB/sec time was for your system, Weebotech? And the time for just a regular parity check? Of course, my times are for parity create. For anyone reading, what are your parity check averages in MB/sec?

 

I reset BIOS a couple of times and it did nothing for the wailing. I haven't updated the BIOS. I'll try that.

 

I'm using the internal Sil3132 port. I got the PMs, though I'm sorry I didn't just get the extra controllers. On my old Abit mobo, I think the parity checks were significantly faster, for the same amount of data - about 40% faster, IIRC. I was using 2 PCI SATA cards (no PCIe slots on that board) - a Promise 4-port and an Adaptec 4-port. The onboard SATA controllers were just 1.5Gb/s, too. That system was all 500GB drives, the same ones I'm using now (except, of course, for the 4 IDEs, 2 on each of the onboard IDE controllers).

 

[jimwhite]

Does the CPU fan speed indicate at all in the bios?  I've had this wailing several times and it was always the tach lead making poor contact on the CPU  Fan connector.

 

My parity check speed builds up and is faster at about 60-80%, then begins to slow down again, all 1 tb drives (9x).  Peaks at about 90 MB/sec, averages in the 70's.... Parity sync runs around 50, since it's doing a write to the parity drive instead of just reading.  Tonight I add 3 more 1 tb drives and fill up the slots... thank God... my credit card is limp 

 

[WeeboTech]

I did a parity check with 6 data drives (ICH) and the parity drive (on the internal Sil3132 port). Check time was still about 20MB/sec. Interesting that the parity create time is different than the regular check. Do your remember what the parity create MB/sec time was for your system, Weebotech? And the time for just a regular parity check? Of course, my times are for parity create. For anyone reading, what are your parity check averages in MB/sec?

 

I did a parity check with 6 data drives (ICH) and the parity drive (on the internal Sil3132 port). Check time was still about 20MB/sec.

 

 

That parity check or create speed is too low. I get from 39KB/s to 60KB/s. Lower side for parity create until it speeds up. Upper speed for check only.

 

I have

6 WD drives on ICH

2 Segate 7200RPM/32MB cache on a SIL3132 PCIe card.

1 Seagate 7200RPM/32MB cache on internal SIL3132 Port. (Parity).

 

I have AHCI enabled for the ICH.

I think I have RAID enabled for the SIL3132's.. I.E. not IDE mode, RAID mode.

 

 

What do you you hook into your JMB port?

 

 

 

I'm using the internal Sil3132 port. I got the PMs, though I'm sorry I didn't just get the extra controllers.

I think you could get away with 1 4 port controller in the 16x slot.

 

This was why I suggested only 1 PM at most.

If you sell of the PM like you said you might, then put a 4x controller in that slot.

 

On my old Abit mobo, I think the parity checks were significantly faster, for the same amount of data - about 40% faster, IIRC. I was using 2 PCI SATA cards (no PCIe slots on that board) - a Promise 4-port and an Adaptec 4-port. The onboard SATA controllers were just 1.5Gb/s, too. That system was all 500GB drives, the same ones I'm using now (except, of course, for the 4 IDEs, 2 on each of the onboard IDE controllers).

 

Do you have the option of slapping the PCI controllers in this machine.

 

You mention 4 ide drives.  Are 2 drives sharing 1 cable?

If so this could be bottleneck (narrow throat as someone posted once  )

 

With IDE drives, communication can only happen to one drive at a time if they share a cable.

 

So there are wait states when a command is sent to the drive.

I.E. a command is not sent to the other drive on the cable until the first one is complete.

This is why SCSI was so much better before SATA. The CPU could disconnect from a device and talk to other devices on the bus.

SATA almost eliminates this issue.

 

When I used IDE drives on PCI controllers in the past. I would arrange them in a specific manner.

I would put two promise controllers in the machine.

Each of the 4 drives had it's own IDE cable.

Then I would stagger the mirror so that each drive of a mirror was on a different controller.

It was only IDE but it was FASSTTT

 

You can "try" leaving the secondary drive out of the array on the IDE drives or stagger them also.

I.E.

 

INT SATA - PM1 - IDE1 - PM2 - INT SATA - PM1 - IDE 3 (primary on other controller) - PM2 -

 

I've had issues when I had multiple IDE drives on the same cable.

In fact an error with one drive can take down the whole channel, so as you can see, I would advise against it.

If you really want to use those drives, perhaps a cheapo promise card from eBay or an IDE to SATA converter.

 

I've used the converters with some success.

 

How old are these iDE drives Plus we need to see a syslog and see how your drives are initlizaing..

i.e. UDMA/133 or not... if not then they could be holding everything back.

 

 

Have you checked all drives for the 1.5Gb/s setting? allot of drives have a jumper that holds the communication speed at 1.5gb/s for compatibility.

[WeeboTech]

Tonight I add 3 more 1 tb drives and fill up the slots... thank God... my credit card is limp

 

What are you storing?? You filled your array up fast.

I just put in my 9th drive and the 1.5tb's are out and mainstream now. I don't even know if I'll fill everything up before they drop in price whereby I can start swapping drives. LOL!

[Joseph Clark]

I'm not using any of the IDE drives for data. I transferred all that data to the new SATA 1.5TB drive. The only IDE drive in the system now is the cache drive, which is connected to the onboard IDE controller. It doesn't seem to have any affect on the system one way or the other, according to the tests I ran, one with it on and the other with it disconnected. I'm assuming it's pretty much ignored in terms of most operations, except at the point the files are being transferred at night.

 

I think the big problem might be that I have the 2 port multipliers in the internal and external Sil ports, so all those drives are probably sharing the same bandwidth. They are staggered this way:

 

cage 1: PM1-mobo-PM2-mobo-PM1

cage 2: mobo-PM2--mobo-PM1-mobo

cage 3: PM2-mobo-PM1-JMicron1-PM2

Parity - JMicron2

Cache - IDE

 

PM1 is on the mobo Sil connector and PM2 is on the external eSATA connector. The last slot in cage 3 is unused at this time, so there's room for one more drive. The JMicron ports are being shared by a single data drive and the parity drive. I tried to isolate parity from the others as much as possible.

 

I've checked all the Seagate drives to make sure they're not jumpered for 1.5Gb/sec, so that shouldn't be a bottleneck.

 

I shouldn't have gotten the PMs at all. I think I'll go Jim's path and add 2 PCIe 2-port controllers and 1 PCIe 4-port controller. The PMs I'll sell over at AVS (or here, if anyone is interested). Could you guys link me again for those controllers? I'm just not sure which Adaptecs to get. The Adaptec 4-port that you referenced, Jim, I can't find. I did find a couple of pretty inexpensive 2-port controllers at Newegg, but the 4-port units were quite expensive, not the $100 I thought we were talking about.

 

One thing that this whole experience has made clear, though, is the ease of migrating drives from one UnRAID system to another (once I sort out these issues). I've had a lot of trouble in the past trying to move arrays created on various onboard and IDE RAID card controllers. That was one of the things I read that was so attractive about UnRAID, and that certainly has proven to be the case with this project. I haven't lost any data.

 

Jim, I'll check the CPU fan lead when this last parity check finishes. Hopefully, it's something that simple.

 

Again, if you guys could link me to the PCIe SATA controllers you're using, that would be a great help.

 

I know how you feel, Weebotech, about adding those latest drives. Once these problems are solved, I'm going to be tempted to triple the size of this UnRAID box by upgrading to more of those 1.5TB drives.

 

[WeeboTech]

I think the big problem might be that I have the 2 port multipliers in the internal and external Sil ports, so all those drives are probably sharing the same bandwidth.

This is surely a bottle neck, just as one PM is settling down and sending data a command is sent on the same lanel to the other one.

 

I was thinking about the Jmicron this afternoon. I think I had to either set it in IDE mode or in RAID mode for it to work.

Have you tried both settings?

 

Also there are 1x PCI SIL3132 cards for $20 on newegg.

 

If you are not using the P-ATA in the protected array and just for cache, you are OK.

 

I tried to isolate parity from the others as much as possible.

I did the same thing. I put my parity drive on it's own $20 SIL3132 controller.

 

I shouldn't have gotten the PMs at all. I think I'll go Jim's path and add 2 PCIe 2-port controllers and 1 PCIe 4-port controller. The PMs I'll sell over at AVS (or here, if anyone is interested). Could you guys link me again for those controllers? I'm just not sure which Adaptecs to get. The Adaptec 4-port that you referenced, Jim, I can't find. I did find a couple of pretty inexpensive 2-port controllers at Newegg, but the 4-port units were quite expensive, not the $100 I thought we were talking about.

 

The PM are probably not working well because the set up os saturating 1 lane with more then 5 drives.

 

Just to be sure, did you do a parity create on only the internal drives, no PM drives?

 

 

I know how you feel, Weebotech, about adding those latest drives. Once these problems are solved, I'm going to be tempted to triple the size of this UnRAID box by upgrading to more of those 1.5TB drives.

What I've learned to do is grow slowly. When I need a drive I make an assessment of cost for the newest largest drive available by 2.

1 for parity, 1 for the data drive I may need to expand. (or add)

I weigh that against how many open slots I have.

 

Then I always buy one drive to have on hand for warm spare replacement.

I.E. I buy it, put it in the machine, but do not add it into the array until I need to spill over.

At that point I make the cost assessment above and either expand or re-grow.

 

I mention this because having 16 drives allocated to the array, but only using half may be a slight pain down the line if you have a drive failure.

IE. Having them physically installed, with at least 1 logically kept out of the array, allows you to stop the array, reassign a failed device to the warm spare, start the array and have the drive building while you RMA the failed drive.

 

How many PM's did you get and how much was one of them?

[Joseph Clark]

I tried just the 6 ICH ports and the parity drive by themselves (PM drives disconnected altogether) and the results (about 20MB/sec) were pretty much the same. Not a good sign, huh? Maybe the warning sound is an indication of a bigger problem.

 

[RobJ]

Did you happen to capture a syslog after each of your experiments?  If so, we can tell a lot about what may be happening, with the board, controllers, and drives.

[Joseph Clark]

OK, here's an interesting twist. I just checked the progress on the parity check and suddenly the speed has jumped to almost 60MB/sec. Estimated completion time went from nearly 20 hours at the beginning of the check (after about an hour) to roughly 11 hours at the end. I'm hoping the error sound is something simple, since the system shows no signs of instability after close to 12 hours of drive activity during the parity check. No overheating - nothing looks (or smells) out of the ordinary.  

 

I'm wondering if the extraordinarily long parity check estimate was the system predicting on the basis of all 1.5TB drives, and when the check passed the end of the large number of 500GB drives, it went a lot faster. The bottlenecks would be gone when just the parity and the single 1.5TB drives are active.

 

This is a very good sign, I think. I plan to get the PCIe cards and hopefully the bottlenecks will be gone or dramatically reduced.

 

I saw the $20 cards at Newegg:

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124004

 

I still haven't found a $100 PCIe x4 card. Jim?

 

Here's the plan, when I get these cards:

 

Cage 1: mobo - Sil3132 card 1 - x4 card 1 - mobo - x4 card 2

Cage 2: Sil3132 card 2 - mobo - x4 card 3 - x4 card 4 - mobo

Cage 3: JMicron1 - onboard Sil3132 - mobo - JMicron2 - onboard Sil3132 (eSATA)

Parity: x1 Sil3132 card

Cache: IDE controller

 

This gives the parity drive its own x1 lane, and it spreads out the other drives among the controllers so as to avoid congestion. My tests definitely showed that staggering the drives improves performance dramatically, and this staggers them even more effectively.

 

Thanks, everyone.

 

[Joseph Clark]

No, I didn't capture a syslog after each of the experiments. Sorry.

 

[woods62]

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2468.0

PCIex4  adaptec 4 port for 88 to 120

 

I got mine from newegg, it also came with 4 REALLY nice blue sata cables, the nice flexable kind and there aleasy 24" long.

[WeeboTech]

60MB/s is more like it.

I think the 500MB drives might be slowing down the initial calculation. It does on mine, but not to that degree.

Once it surpasses those drives, it speeds up.

Although having the two port multipliers on 1 controller and 1x lane is a huge bottleneck too.

 

That's why if you go back a bit I suggested an alternative of one 4x controller and only 1 port multiplier, or 3 controllers. (1)4x/4port, 2(1x/2port)

If you were able to get one of the PM's running on the JMB you would be OK also. I was able to with different hardware in RAID mode.

 

Next reboot do a grep on your syslog and make sure everything is running at 3G.

grep 'SATA link' /var/log/syslog

 

This is the 2 port SIL3132 card I am using. It's cheap and I like options.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815280008

 

I'm not using the 1430sa yet.. I was planning on playing with a PM to see how it worked out.

 

I'm also planning to check out this card which is based on the same chip set.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132018

[Joseph Clark]

When I type

 

grep 'SATA link' /var/log/syslog

 

I get a "Password:" prompt but am locked out on the keyboard. Nothing I type shows up on the screen. What am I missing?

 

I got the 2 PCIe 2-port cards from Newegg, but the 4-port Adaptec isn't coming until Monday. Thought I'd replace one of the PMs with the 2 cards an do a parity check to see how much of an improvement it makes. When I get the 4-port Adaptec Monday, it should provide a better basis of comparison for using port multipliers vs PCIe cards.

 

One thing I've noted during boot is that the process seems to take a lot longer than it does without the PMs. The system goes through a long series of soft and hard reset failures before it seems to recognize the drives as 3G.

 

[WeeboTech]

When I type

 

grep 'SATA link' /var/log/syslog

 

I get a "Password:" prompt but am locked out on the keyboard. Nothing I type shows up on the screen. What am I missing?

 

Login as root first.

When the password prompt is displayed, enter the password defined (as per web page) or press enter for no password.

 

I got the 2 PCIe 2-port cards from Newegg, but the 4-port Adaptec isn't coming until Monday. Thought I'd replace one of the PMs with the 2 cards an do a parity check to see how much of an improvement it makes. When I get the 4-port Adaptec Monday, it should provide a better basis of comparison for using port multipliers vs PCIe cards.

 

The SIL3132 cards should also support a PM. it would be interesting to see if moving one PM to each separate controller provides any improvement... But then again. It's a pretty long test. LOL.

 

 

One thing I've noted during boot is that the process seems to take a lot longer than it does without the PMs. The system goes through a long series of soft and hard reset failures before it seems to recognize the drives as 3G.

 

The more controllers in a system, the more bios scans that occur.

[Joseph Clark]

Thanks. The info scrolls off the screen before I can see all of it, so I'm not sure what's in the off-screen data. At least one of the hard drives, apparently, is detected at 1.5 Gbps. All the lines I can see contain "ata3 (or 4, 5, 6, etc.): SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)," except for one that says "ata 2.05: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 320." Is there a clear way of telling if a drive is 1.5 or 3.0 Gbps, from the label on the drive? It's possible that an older 500GB drive sneaked in at 1.5Gbps, but I don't remember it.

 

The last 8 drives have "ata3, ata4, ata5, etc., while the earlier drives have "ata2.05, ata2.04, ata2.03." I'm guessing the PM-attached drives have the ata2.05, 2.04, 2.03 designations?

 

[Joseph Clark]

Even if I had the time to test a PM with each of the new cards (i.e. one PM per card), I don't see how I'd stuff all this in the box.  One problem with the PMs is that they have the SATA ports along the flat sides of the cards, instead of the end/edge. The SATA cables protrude into the next PCI slot space and make adding other PCI cards very tough, so there's not enough physical space for 2 2-port cards and 2 PMs in the slots on the mobo.

[WeeboTech]

You can post your syslog and the crew will review it.

 

Procedure is in the wki here.

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Troubleshooting

 

>> Is there a clear way of telling if a drive is 1.5 or 3.0 Gbps, from the label on the drive?

No, Only in the back of the drive, it may have a jumper.

 

>> It's possible that an older 500GB drive sneaked in at 1.5Gbps, but I don't remember it.

Through tracking with the syslog, it can be determined which drive model (via model number, then bus id, then serial number) is in question.

 

I believe it is like this.

 

Example

Oct  4 19:28:47 Atlas kernel: ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 0)

Oct  4 19:28:47 Atlas kernel: ata1.00: ATA-8: ST31000340AS, SD15, max UDMA/133

 

points to the following because it usually in connection with the messages abive above

Oct  4 19:28:47 Atlas kernel: scsi 1:0:0:0: Direct-Access    ATA      ST31000340AS    SD15 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5

Oct  4 19:28:47 Atlas kernel: sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] 1953525168 512-byte hardware sectors (1000205 MB)

 

points to

Oct  4 19:28:50 Atlas emhttp: pci-0000:03:00.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 (sda) ata-ST31000340AS_5QJ0BH1D

 

There might be an easier way I have not found yet. 

 

Post your syslog and we'll take a peek.

[Joseph Clark]

OK, here's the syslog. I found 2 references to 1.5Gbps but wasn't sure how to interpret them to find the drives.

 

[WeeboTech]

 

From what I can tell, and it is confusing, it looks as if the ports without drives are dropping to 1.5gb/s or that is the port going back to the controller.

 

I.E. 5th port on controller.

 

Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 0)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.15: Port Multiplier 1.1, 0x1095:0x3726 r23, 6 ports, feat 0x1/0x9
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.00: hard resetting link
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.00: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 10)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.01: hard resetting link
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.01: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.02: hard resetting link
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.02: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.03: hard resetting link
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.03: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 320)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.04: hard resetting link
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.04: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.05: hard resetting link
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.05: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 320)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.01: ATA-7: WDC WD5000KS-60MNB0, 08.02E08, max UDMA/100
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.01: 976773168 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.01: configured for UDMA/100
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.02: ATA-7: Hitachi HDT725050VLA360, V56OA7EA, max UDMA/133
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.02: 976773168 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.02: configured for UDMA/100
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.04: ATA-8: ST3500320AS, SD15, max UDMA/133
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.04: 976773168 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1.04: configured for UDMA/100
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata1: EH complete


Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 0)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.15: Port Multiplier 1.1, 0x1095:0x3726 r23, 6 ports, feat 0x1/0x9
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.00: hard resetting link
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.00: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 10)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.01: hard resetting link
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.01: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.02: hard resetting link
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.02: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.03: hard resetting link
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.03: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.04: hard resetting link
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.04: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.05: hard resetting link
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.05: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 320)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.01: ATA-8: SAMSUNG HD501LJ, CR100-10, max UDMA7
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.01: 976773168 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.01: configured for UDMA/100
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.02: ATA-7: ST3500841AS, 3.AAE, max UDMA/133
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.02: 976773168 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.02: configured for UDMA/100
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.03: ATA-7: Hitachi HDT725050VLA360, V56OA7EA, max UDMA/133
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.03: 976773168 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.03: configured for UDMA/100
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.04: ATA-7: WDC WD5000KS-60MNB0, 08.02E08, max UDMA/100
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.04: 976773168 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2.04: configured for UDMA/100
Oct 11 04:28:21 Tower2 kernel: ata2: EH complete

 

[Joseph Clark]

Both PMs have only 4 drives attached, not 5. One port on each is not used. Could this be what's causing the reference to 1.5Gbps? Seems like it shouldn't be a problem, right?

 

Thanks for checking it out.

[WeeboTech]

Yes, that is exactly what I surmised.

[Joseph Clark]

Update time:

 

I received my 3 PCIe SATA cards (2 2-port PCIe x1 cards and 1 Adaptec 4-port PCIe x4). Here's how I've staggered them:

 

Cage 1: mobo - sil3132 card 1, port 1 - Adaptec x4 port 1 - mobo - Adaptec x4 port 2

Cage 2: JMicron1 - mobo - Adaptec x4 port 3 - onboard sil3132 - mobo

Cage 3: sil3132 card 1, port 2 - mobo - Adaptec x4 port 4 - JMicron2 - onboard sil3132 (eSATA) (unused at this time)

Parity: sil3132 card 2 (parity is on this card by itself - the second port is unused)

Cache: IDE controller (by itself - no other IDE drive in the system)

 

The 6th (and last) mobo port is not used, and I staggered them so that a mobo port would be accessed for every third drive. The rest I staggered fairly evenly among the onboard Sil3132 ports, the JMicrons and the PCIe card ports.

 

For parity checks, I went from just under 20MB/sec with the 2 port multipliers to just under 55MB/sec with the separate PCIe SATA cards (although this number fluctuates a bit, depending on when I hit the "Refresh" button - not sure why that is). This is near the start of the parity check. The system also boots considerably faster with the PCIe SATA cards installed than the PMs. I think it might be fair to assume that once the parity check has passed the 500GB drives in my system that I may be close to the 90MB/sec that Jim is getting with his Abit AB9 Pro mobo.  That's based on the dramatic improvement I got when the parity check passed those 500GB drives when I was using the PMs.

 

I didn't have the patience to try a parity check using the 4-port PCIe Adaptec card and one PM (without the other PCIe x1 SATA cards). I imagine it would have been a little slower (maybe considerably), but I won't know for sure.

 

Still troubling is the mobo wailing. That hasn't changed, even though I fiddled with the CPU fan power pins. The CPU fan is working fine, BTW. If anyone has any other ideas about what this might mean, I 'd really like to hear it. So far, it doesn't seem to have had any effect on the system, but it makes me nervous to know that an unresolved issue is hanging there.

 

Thanks, again, everyone, for all the assistance in moving my UnRAID box to another motherboard. I learned a lot in the process.