After reading through ~ 10 threads, I still have no idea about the AOC-SASLP-MV8

[Automatic]

So, I just read ~ 15 thread to do with people thinking their entire drives are failing but it really being a power connector, people saying "I'll get back to you if it works on unraid" and never replying in the last 6 months, I find a post by someone with my same MOBO/wanted controller in their signature along with only 3TB+ drives, guess what? Been offline for the last 3 weeks.

 

Basically:-

 

A. Does the AOC-SASLP-MV8 support greater than 2.2TB HDDs (E.G. 3TB)

B. Would this work fine on a PCIe x4 slot with no (Or very little) bottle necking? Assuming all the drives are 'average' HDDs, no fast SSDs/etc.

C. What would be the firmware I'd want to choose? .15? .21? .somethingThatIHaveToEmailSomeoneToAcquire?

D. Will it work with this mobo?

E. Will two of these work together (Not needed at the moment, but, I may need this at a later date)?

 

Just note, since apparently people in other thread got confused, this is the SASLP and not the SAAS2LP.

 

Preferably asking answers from someone who owns one (or more) of these devices which seems to be a lot based of the number of signatures from this site that google threw up when I was attempting to google for the answers.

 

EDIT:- Also forgot to say, I only care about unraid, not about windows.

EDIT2:- As per edit 1, no solutions such as running a virtual machine of unraid inside a copy of windows, which is what I think the next thread I just read is about (Based on his signature and the fact that, well "unraid server booting it to WINDOWS 2008r2 with the updated driver.")

[vca]

A: it is supposed to but I have not tried yet

 

B: yes it is fine in a 4x slot

 

C: either version should be OK, from what I recall there was some specific issue that people were fixing by using the newer firmware.  It might have been getting two of these to work with a specific motherboard

 

D: one would hope so, works fine in an Asus board for me

 

E: plenty of people run two of these, but there do seem to be some issues with this - see point C

 

Regards

Stephen

 

[Marky]

I'm using 2 of these together, both have the .15 firmware and are fully populated with hitachi 4TB drives. Works fine.

 

Mark

 

[mrow]

Works fine with 3+ TB drives. I had two attached to it before I moved most of my disks to an IBM M1015. I have also had the card in 16x and 8x slots of various different motherboards of various different brands. No 4x though I can't imagine why it wouldn't considering it is a 4x card...

[Automatic]

Fair enough, if all three of you have had good reviews and experiences getting to to work with 3TB I guess I'll go ahead and buy it.

[UhClem]

...

B. Would this work fine on a PCIe x4 slot with no (Or very little) bottle necking? Assuming all the drives are 'average' HDDs, no fast SSDs/etc.

Expect a maximum sustained throughput of ~680 MB/sec (per board; assuming your PCIe infrastructure does not  get saturated by multiple boards at "full throttle")

 

Whether that qualifies as a bottleneck is your call . [Consider that 8 recent-generation drives (max transfer rate 150-180 MB/s) will only achieve about 50% of their max at begin of a parity check.]

 

See this thread [link] for more details.

 

My advice would be to take advantage of your motherboard's PCIe v2.0 performance and use a v2.0 controller (vs this v1 controller) e.g. M1015 (M1015 is fine in your x8(phys)/x4(elec) v2 slot).

 

--UhClem  "Measure twice--cut once."

 

[jowi]

FWIW, i'm using 4TB drives on a AOC-SAS2LP-MV8.

[Automatic]

FWIW, i'm using 4TB drives on a AOC-SAS2LP-MV8.

 

That one has no dispute about if it can support it (Everyone google turned over says "Works fine"), however, it costs double the price and requires an x8 PCI slot, which, I do have, but, I'd rather get something that can fill the lower slots if I can so that I can leave the greater slots open.

[Automatic]

...

B. Would this work fine on a PCIe x4 slot with no (Or very little) bottle necking? Assuming all the drives are 'average' HDDs, no fast SSDs/etc.

Expect a maximum sustained throughput of ~680 MB/sec (per board; assuming your PCIe infrastructure does not  get saturated by multiple boards at "full throttle")

 

Whether that qualifies as a bottleneck is your call . [Consider that 8 recent-generation drives (max transfer rate 150-180 MB/s) will only achieve about 50% of their max at begin of a parity check.]

 

See this thread [link] for more details.

 

My advice would be to take advantage of your motherboard's PCIe v2.0 performance and use a v2.0 controller (vs this v1 controller) e.g. M1015 (M1015 is fine in your x8(phys)/x4(elec) v2 slot).

 

--UhClem  "Measure twice--cut once."

 

So, I just read that thread (Excluding the last page, because it seemed to just be a load of logs), however my question is:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express

 

Capacity	
Per lane (each direction):
v1.x: 250 MB/s (2.5 GT/s)

 

So, I presume (I'm not a hardware guy) that this controller is using version 1? Based on the fact you recommended version 2; I'm also presuming that x4 means 4 lanes.

 

250MB/s * 4 = 1000MB/s

1000MB/s / 8 (drives) = 125MB/s

 

Would that not be a limit of 125MB/s per drive? Once again, I don't understand hardware for the life of me.

[S80_UK]

So, I presume (I'm not a hardware guy) that this controller is using version 1? Based on the fact you recommended version 2; I'm also presuming that x4 means 4 lanes.

 

250MB/s * 4 = 1000MB/s

1000MB/s / 8 (drives) = 125MB/s

 

Would that not be a limit of 125MB/s per drive? Once again, I don't understand hardware for the life of me.

 

125MB/s = 125 MegaBytes per second per drive.  Since a gigabit LAN connection tops out at less than that due to networking overheads, the drive speed is not the limitation to the speed of access.

[Automatic]

So, I presume (I'm not a hardware guy) that this controller is using version 1? Based on the fact you recommended version 2; I'm also presuming that x4 means 4 lanes.

 

250MB/s * 4 = 1000MB/s

1000MB/s / 8 (drives) = 125MB/s

 

Would that not be a limit of 125MB/s per drive? Once again, I don't understand hardware for the life of me.

 

125MB/s = 125 MegaBytes per second per drive.  Since a gigabit LAN connection tops out at less than that due to networking overheads, the drive speed is not the limitation to the speed of access.

 

Yeah, I do understand the difference between MB, Mb, MiB, Mib. As for the gigabit lan connection, I'm more thinking all around, including both external (Via LAN) as well as internal, for example parity checks, drive reconstruction or (The biggest reason) transferring data off the cache drive and into my shares!).

[S80_UK]

Yeah, I do understand the difference between MB, Mb, MiB, Mib. As for the gigabit lan connection, I'm more thinking all around, including both external (Via LAN) as well as internal, for example parity checks, drive reconstruction or (The biggest reason) transferring data off the cache drive and into my shares!).

 

OK - sorry about that.  Lot's of people here get them mixed, and it wasn't clear from the doubts that you were expressing whether you understood the terms or not.

 

So while the SATA controller won't significantly impact on LAN access to or from the shares, it would make a difference on parity checking, or on a parity rebuild, or on the emulation of a failed drive - these are the cases when all drives are being accessed at the same time.  If you plan to go to 8 drives on the controller I would be inclined to go for the faster card (e.g. AOC-SAS2LP-MV8) for those reasons.  I have the slower one (AOC-SASLP-MV8) but with only four drives connected currently. 

 

Transfers from the cache drive to the shares only involve three drives being accessed - the cache (reading), the destination drive and the parity drive (both are read and then written).  the other drives are not touched in this process.

[Automatic]

Yeah, I do understand the difference between MB, Mb, MiB, Mib. As for the gigabit lan connection, I'm more thinking all around, including both external (Via LAN) as well as internal, for example parity checks, drive reconstruction or (The biggest reason) transferring data off the cache drive and into my shares!).

 

OK - sorry about that.  Lot's of people here get them mixed, and it wasn't clear from the doubts that you were expressing whether you understood the terms or not.

 

So while the SATA controller won't significantly impact on LAN access to or from the shares, it would make a difference on parity checking, or on a parity rebuild, or on the emulation of a failed drive - these are the cases when all drives are being accessed at the same time.  If you plan to go to 8 drives on the controller I would be inclined to go for the faster card (e.g. AOC-SAS2LP-MV8) for those reasons.  I have the slower one (AOC-SASLP-MV8) but with only four drives connected currently. 

 

Transfers from the cache drive to the shares only involve three drives being accessed - the cache (reading), the destination drive and the parity drive (both are read and then written).  the other drives are not touched in this process.

 

In fact, with your explanation of the cache drive (Which, I honestly should of thought of) that does put me off the idea of paying double the price just to have faster parity related items.

 

Thanks, I think I'll go with the lower end model, although I'd still like my PCI question answered.

[Automatic]

Finally got my breakout cables (I missed the first delivery yesterday, took forever to come anyway).

 

To anyone wondering, the BIOS instantly detected it:-

 

and easily loaded up without any configuration needed, once unraid redownloaded all my plugins (Which at my internet speed is ~ 5 minutes):-

 

Time to start preclearing them. How fun.