perfessor101 Posted September 27, 2008 Share Posted September 27, 2008 Hello ... I've been lurking for a while checking things out and finally committed to UnRaid as a solution for storing all my SageTV recordings long term. I'm finally ready to build an UnRaid system and I was curious about which Motherboards with an ICH10R chipset would prove to be the least problematic. ie supported gigabit, sata chipsets, etc ... (motherboard components) ICH10R in hopes of playing with some port multipliers later. These are available locally: (Vancouver, BC) BioStar TPower I45 5.x http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en-us/t-power/content.php?S_ID=365 ASUS P5Q Pro http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=709&l4=0&model=2269&modelmenu=1 Atheros Gigabit L1 - Support in the Kernel as of 2.6.27 I think? (currently unstable) ASUS P5Q-E http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=709&l4=0&model=2267&modelmenu=1 Thanks for your time, Bobby ps did some testing with an old computer A7M 266D ... that was a nightmare ... would not boot from USB no matter what tried three different kickers tried plop ... major headaches all around ;-) Quote Link to comment
WeeboTech Posted September 27, 2008 Share Posted September 27, 2008 s did some testing with an old computer A7M 266D ... that was a nightmare ... would not boot from USB no matter what tried three different kickers tried plop ... major headaches all around ;-) Were you able to boot from a CD? If so, then I can help you with a procedure and floppy that will work once you get unRAID loaded onto one of your data disks. look at grub4dos. What I did was boot unraid from CD. Bring up a small system. Copy bzimage & bzroot to a /boot folder on /mnt/disk1. Created a freedos with grub4dos, set menu.lst to look for bzimage/bzroot on one of the hard drives and boot from it. Surprisingly it worked out well. The first issue is booting unraid far enough to create the data disks then copy the /boot files to /mnt/disk1. as for board... I'm considering the PQ5-E myself. It has 2 Silicom Image ports which can be set to hardware RAID1 or RAID0. The operating system will see it as one drive and it should work with unRAID out of the box (Should.. LOL). Southbridge - 6 x SATA 3Gb/s - Intel® Matrix Storage Technology with RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 support Marvell 88SE6121 - 1 x UltraDMA 133/100/66 for up to 2 PATA devices - 1 x External SATA 3Gb/s port (SATA On-the-Go) Silicon Image Sil5723 (Drive Xpert technology) - 2 x SATA 3Gb/s I also like that it has 2 wider PCI Express slots.. So it looks possible to install two adaptec 1430sa cards yeilding another 8 ports at high bandwidth. 2 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots, support ATI CrossFireX™ technology, at x8 link (PCIe x16_1 blue, PCIe x16_2 black*) 1 x PCI Express x16 slot at max. x4 link(black) 2 x PCI Express x1 slots 2 x PCI slots *PCI Express x16_2 slot (black at max. x8 link) I have to do s'more research. If you go this route I would love to hear of your experience. Quote Link to comment
perfessor101 Posted October 12, 2008 Author Share Posted October 12, 2008 I just got the P5Q-E with a E5200 2.5 Ghz dual core processor and 2x2GB OCZ DDR2-800 SATA drives were first detected in AHCI mode Here's the syslog attached My Parity speeds testing with 3 x IDE drives connected to a tx2-100 promise harddisk controller are around 22500 KB/s I'll let you know how things go from here ... I have backups on the one drive so I'm waiting until I've done one or two parity checks before I bring the Sata's online (then destroy the array and start over ;-) Bobby ps - (I'm trying to decide if I should use two 500GB drives on the drive xpert drives for parity) Quote Link to comment
WeeboTech Posted October 12, 2008 Share Posted October 12, 2008 ps - (I'm trying to decide if I should use two 500GB drives on the drive xpert drives for parity) This was one of the reasons I was looking into that board. I'm not sure how much RAID0 buys you with that configuration. In mine a hardware RAID0 via the same Silicon Image chip did yield a small but measurable increase in performance. I would love to see what your test results reveal. Quote Link to comment
perfessor101 Posted October 13, 2008 Author Share Posted October 13, 2008 minor ramblings at end ... When copying from windows I am getting a 'path too deep error' ... from h:\test\ to \\storage\test the filename length is 8+3 on the files I am testing (just by coincidence they are 'long filenames'). (latest beta as of 2008 Oct 13 02:30 am) 4.2.4b2 I think The server can't be accessed after the error via Http and more often than not it locks up telnet sessions through putty and the last time even locked up the USB keyboard attached to the server. Although when I hit the power button it appears to do a 'clean' linux shutdown. I am currently using the sky2 drivers on the second nic (marvell 88e8056 / 88e8001 Gigabit Lan controller) The first NIC isn't lighting it's led's. I tried three different cables to my switch and then I tried the last cable on 3 different ports ... the second NIC was showing link activity with all cables on all ports. I have no room for a PCI based NIC unless I start dropping hard drives ... the only other post upon searching this error was solved by the person putting in a new NIC and disabling the onboard ports. I guess I could try this "Rosewill RC-411 10/ 100/ 1000Mbps PCI-Express Network Adapter 1 x RJ45 - Retail" Realtek RTL8168 based ... but that will take a few days to arrive I'm going to take out the motherboard and take a second look at the first NIC just in case ... and ask about RMA'ing the mobo if I can't get it working. (No visible damage to the motherboard ... First NIC will not light without a very bright flashlight behind it) Bobby I decided to use the onboard ide port and drop one of the seven 250 GB drives and slip in a Intel 1000 Pro PCI card ... I removed one of the promise 100tx2 cards and moved one of the ide cables to the onboard port ... I put the intel pro 1000 PCI card in ... I can now copy files to the array with no apparent problems. The only IDE drives detected are on the promise pci controller It appears as though Unraid as built in the beta doesn't detect the Marvell 88SE6121 IDE controller ... I'll have to see if it detects drives connected to the Sata port but I'll need an eSata to Sata cable for checking that. The Great Turkey Day in Canada ... I wonder what will be open Quote Link to comment
Romir Posted October 13, 2008 Share Posted October 13, 2008 I have a P5Q-E coming in tomorrow that I'll check compatibility with. The e-sata port will be the first thing I'll test, and then the nics. I'm fairly sure the Marvell 88E8001 PCI based NIC works on my P5B based unraid server. I tried it when I was troubleshooting Vista gigabit speed issues which haven't fully gone away for me. The P5Q is going in my desktop but down the road I'd like it to replace my unraid server's P5B Deluxe. Two more pci-e slots will let me fill all 20 hot swap bays with full speed drives, if and when we get support for larger or multiple arrays. Quote Link to comment
perfessor101 Posted October 14, 2008 Author Share Posted October 14, 2008 The NIC drivers under linux are Sky2 and Skge and I'm not seeing much good about them under linux online ... but then again ... Google and get 10,000 people asking why? and try to find the one or two good answers that solve the problem ... The lower nic was 'working' with the Sky2 driver but kept on dropping the connection and giving me the 'path too deep error'. The top NIC I have not seen anything good said about it under linux The top Nic also appears dead on my motherboard ... no lights, no matter what I connect it to. The Bios lists the drives on boot (four drives on the promise 100tx2 card and two on the Marvell controller). I've temporarily disconnected the Sata drives to make it easier to figure out what is listed in the syslog. Unraid still doesn't list those two drives so I'm trying to decide if I should try Gentoo to see what that detects ... Here's the P5Q-E listing under gentoo linux http://gentoo-wiki.com/SATA if that helps ... Quote Link to comment
Romir Posted October 14, 2008 Share Posted October 14, 2008 UPS delayed my board, it should be here tomorrow. Quote Link to comment
perfessor101 Posted October 14, 2008 Author Share Posted October 14, 2008 I'm trying to figure out the dmesg ... it appears that I have six PATA drives when I boot under Slax USB Live. It looks the same as when I boot under unraid so I may need so help figuring out the dmesg Actually it looks like I have 8 Pata drives in the dmesg ... only six attached to the computer ... hmmm ... So much for it being simple ;-) attached text files : dmesg.txt - dmesg ata.txt - dmesg | grep ata md.txt - dmesg | grep md hd.txt - dmesg | grep hd Thanks for any help, Bobby Quote Link to comment
Romir Posted October 15, 2008 Share Posted October 15, 2008 The Marvell 88SE6121 controller handles the e-sata port so that isn't working. I also didn't know that the drive xpert ports only allowed one drive when not using its raid feature. That one drive didn't show up in unraid either. The pci-e based nic was detected but not functional and the pci one seemed to work fine with the few transfers I tried. What a bummer. Quote Link to comment
perfessor101 Posted October 24, 2008 Author Share Posted October 24, 2008 I'm still having fun with the first Marvell Nic on the ASUS P5Q-E under unRaid ... it works in Gentoo 2008 and it seems I can do large file transfers fine. It works smoothly in Windows XP SP3 ... which was fun to install on a system configured for unRaid. I'm curious the Skge and Sky2 modules are loading but the first nic never seems to get activated under unRaid (from /sbin/lsmod) Module Size Used by md_mod 52428 6 ide_disk 11136 16 ata_piix 16132 0 skge 33808 0 pdc202xx_new 6016 0 [permanent] ide_core 85108 2 ide_disk,pdc202xx_new sky2 37124 0 ahci 23944 0 libata 126816 2 ata_piix,ahci (from /sbin/lspci -v) 05:02.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8001 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 14) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Marvell 88E8001 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Asus) Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 18 Memory at febf4000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) I/O ports at d400 Expansion ROM at f0000000 [disabled] Capabilities: [48] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [50] Vital Product Data Kernel driver in use: skge Kernel modules: skge 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 12) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Unknown device 81f8 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 219 Memory at fe9fc000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) I/O ports at b800 Expansion ROM at fe9c0000 [disabled] Capabilities: [48] Power Management version 3 Capabilities: [50] Vital Product Data Capabilities: [5c] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable+ Capabilities: [e0] Express Legacy Endpoint, MSI 00 Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting Kernel driver in use: sky2 Kernel modules: sky2 Can anyone see anything that I should be looking for to get it working ? and does anyone know of a PCI-E based network adapter that is reasonably priced and will work? or I guess a usb one? or a PCI-E based Wireless N network adapter? Bobby Quote Link to comment
WeeboTech Posted October 24, 2008 Share Posted October 24, 2008 I think the unRAID startup is only designed to initialize 1 nic. I would try going into the bios and disabling one of the nics and seeing what happens. If that is not the nic you want to use, go into the bios and swap which is disabled and see what happens. Quote Link to comment
perfessor101 Posted December 27, 2008 Author Share Posted December 27, 2008 I tried two old Sata drives in the Silicon Image Sil5723 (Drive Xpert technology) and two Sata-150 drives running at 50 MB/s each were running at 90 MB/s striped when I ran preclear_disk.sh on them ... so they may work as the parity disk (unRaid 4.5 beta 1) unRaid sees this controller now ... The only thing is ... no smart data that I could tell ... I knew one of the drives was iffy and it hung on that drive on the first pass, On the second try it sailed by. So fast Parity drives ... but two drives ... without smartdata ... On the Marvell 88SE6121 unRaid doesn't see the PATA drives, and I haven't tried the e-Sata port again. The other six Sata ports work around 83MB/s with 1TB Seagates and a 500GB WD-7200rpm Quote Link to comment
dandirk Posted January 1, 2009 Share Posted January 1, 2009 Curious Prof... Did you get one of the onboard nics to function correctly? Seems like things are running better on 4.5 now? Quote Link to comment
perfessor101 Posted January 2, 2009 Author Share Posted January 2, 2009 So far yes things seem to be working much better. The Sky2 driver in 4.5beta1 seems to be working much better (I'm not sure if it's different). I have been doing several large transfers since with no problems. One thing I have noticed with XP is to leave the Security and DFS Tabs alone on the Properties Dialog for directories on the unRaid system ... as that seems to be when I get hiccups between XP and the unRaid nic. I'm thinking about getting one of these to try out for expansion ... SYBA SY-JM363-2S1P PCI Express SATA / IDE Combo Controller Card - Retail : http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124007 Give me two more PATA drives and Two SATA drives on one PCI-E slot Quote Link to comment
abq-pete Posted January 5, 2009 Share Posted January 5, 2009 I picked up the P5Q Deluxe (a few additional features over the P5Q-E). I was hoping to get a board that supports 8 SATA along with 3 PCI-E slots handling at least x4 lanes. Using 4.5 B1 I noted the following: 1. LAN 1 works fine at gigabit speeds. I disabled LAN 2 as it was not needed in my application. 2. The 6 SATA ports running off of ICH10R work fine. 3. The 3 PCI-E lanes run at x16, x8 and x4. However, if you use any of the x1 connections, the x4 slot drops to x1 as well according to the documentation. 4. The Drive Expert connection is really troublesome. I was hoping for 2 additional ports ( total 8 ) but as a normal SATA connection, you can only use Port 0. Even that had problems in the latest bios. Sometimes it would see my drive; others not. Often the configuration menu was grayed out so that I could not make changes. I went online to Asus' website and found reports that theses additional SIL ports were not particularly fast (at least under Vista). Anyway, my main reason for choosing this board was the hopes of getting 8 native SATA ports along with the 3 PCI-E slots (so I can use 3 Adaptec 1430SA adapters allowing 12 additional drives). Since I am not able to achieve this, I've decided to return the board and continue my search for the perfect motherboard... Regards, Peter Quote Link to comment
smino Posted April 9, 2009 Share Posted April 9, 2009 I just bought the Asus P5Q Deluxe. The only problem I ran into was using a PCI video card. As soon as I switched over to a pcie card, everything worked fine. Silicon Image Sil5723 (Drive Xpert technology) - 2 x SATA 3Gb/s setup un raid zero showed up fine in unRaid. I just built the system last night. I never seen unRaid boot so fast, not even on my other dual core system, same speed roughly. I will have to look into why that is. Hmm... I will test transfer speeds with and without parity, stability. I'll post my logs as well. Asus P5Q Deluxe (Left everything default, except removed floppy) Intel CPU E8400 Kingston Value Ram 8GB (planning for future) Antec 1200 Case 12 bay case for 190$ Canadian (I will post a review on it later. Lots of fans and cooling!) I also just borrowed a kill-a-watt. Will test!@ Cheers for now. Quote Link to comment
smino Posted April 11, 2009 Share Posted April 11, 2009 Look for a post in the Motherboard section about "ASUS P5Q Deluxe (A+!)" I decided to post my results in its own thread to now hijack yours... Quote Link to comment
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