Romir Posted February 28, 2009 Share Posted February 28, 2009 This card appears to have gone up on Supermicro's site recently as the PDF manual creation date is 2/2/09. I would've expected some chatter about it somewhere by now. A google search of the model only brings up 8 results. One of them is a dutch shop and they seem to be listing it for roughly $125. I could be very wrong about that price though. Is this the card that Unraid, WHS, and software raid community have been waiting years for? The Marvell 88SE6480 appears to be supported in the scsi "Marvell 88SE6440 SAS/SATA" mvsas kernel driver since last year. http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SASLP-MV8.cfm Overview The AOC-SASLP-MV8 add-on card is a highly efficient, highly compatible and easy-to-use SAS/SATA Controller that allows the user to connect to up to eight drives using Marvell's 88SE6480 Serial ATA/SAS Host Controller and a PCI-E x4 interface with high performance features. Product Features The AOC-SASLP-MV8 add-on card offers the following features: • Low profile Form Factor (w/ the PCB size of 4.75" H x 2.5" W) • Marvell's 88SE6480 Serial ATA Host Controller supports 8 SAS/SATA ports • Two mini SAS connectors can connect to 8 internal SAS/SATA drives with iPass cables • PCI-E x4 • Flash BIOS Interface • Presence LED Indicator and Activity Indicator for each connected drive • JBOD (Simple Volume) support • Boots from a single drive. I'm already dreaming of one of these in an upcoming lower power mini-itx chipset. Or maybe two in a micro-atx system... edit: changed brand from marvell to supermicro Quote Link to comment
SSD Posted February 28, 2009 Share Posted February 28, 2009 This looks like a potentially great controler for unRaid use! Hopefully Tom will add driver support for it (if its not already supported). It would make getting to 16 drives (w/out using the PCI bus)much easier, even with meager PCI-e expandability. With a MB that can support 2 of these, 24 drives would be easily in reach. Quote Link to comment
Romir Posted March 4, 2009 Author Share Posted March 4, 2009 An update from my post on [H]ardForum Originally Posted by Volkum I emailed our rep at work and I'll let ya guys know, assuming it's not a NDA-ed piece of info (alot of the launch date/pre-release pricing info is NDA release only). I also checked distribution and don't see it in channel anywhere so I'm assuming it's not available yet. Available 03/16 @ $89 (best pricing). Quote Link to comment
dstoe Posted March 11, 2009 Share Posted March 11, 2009 Does anybody know of a mainboard with 3 PCI-E x4 slots? regards Dominik Quote Link to comment
Romir Posted March 11, 2009 Author Share Posted March 11, 2009 Does anybody know of a mainboard with 3 PCI-E x4 slots? regards Dominik PCI-E x4 cards work in x8 or x16 slots. There are numerous dual x16 boards with a x4 slot as well. Most are aimed at dual video card enthusiasts and will lack onboard video. The Asus P5Q-E is a good pick, although it doesn't have onboard video. It does feature "Drive Xpert", an onboard controller that presents two disks in raid 0 or 1 to the OS as a single drive. This has been reported working in the latest unraid releases. A mirrored cache drive pair is a sought after feature for some users and this is the easiest way to do it. Quote Link to comment
smino Posted March 19, 2009 Share Posted March 19, 2009 Do the cables come with it, or do you need extra cables? Added my own answer: You need to purchase the cables separately 2x CBL-0097L-02 Quote Link to comment
Romir Posted March 20, 2009 Author Share Posted March 20, 2009 Most of these Supermicro retail cards come with nice cables. Quote Link to comment
WeeboTech Posted March 20, 2009 Share Posted March 20, 2009 The Asus P5Q-E is a good pick, although it doesn't have onboard video. It does feature "Drive Xpert", an onboard controller that presents two disks in raid 0 or 1 to the OS as a single drive. This has been reported working in the latest unraid releases. A mirrored cache drive pair is a sought after feature for some users and this is the easiest way to do it. This is why I was looking into this a while ago. Hardware RAID0 or RAID1. Quote Link to comment
Romir Posted March 21, 2009 Author Share Posted March 21, 2009 Most of these Supermicro retail cards come with nice cables. Apparently these have started shipping from Supermicro and are white box items without the foward mini-sas to sata cables. Bummer. On the other hand, the card is cheaper than initially expected at $105. Here are a few examples of the required break out cables. http://www.provantage.com/3ware-cbl-sff8087ocf-05m~73WAR02N.htm http://www.provantage.com/3ware-cbl-sff8087ocf-10m~73WAR02P.htm http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.18023 Quote Link to comment
TSM Posted March 24, 2009 Share Posted March 24, 2009 Please... Please... Please... Any brave soul ventures to get this... Please report back on your findings asap. I'm such a nerd. The excitement and anticipation is killing me. Quote Link to comment
Romir Posted March 24, 2009 Author Share Posted March 24, 2009 I'm not 100% sure but it looks like this marvel chipset been supported in the linux kernel for about a year now under the scsi "Marvell 88SE6440 SAS/SATA" "mvsas" driver. From what I can tell, the driver isn't build into the unRAID kernel in 4.4. Quote Link to comment
erikatcuse Posted March 24, 2009 Share Posted March 24, 2009 If this card recognizes the drives with a sas string it might not work even with the proper driver. Check out my post about the sas problem. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3109.0 Basically HDIO_GET_IDENTITY doesn't work with SAS in our current kernel but the newer version it does. Again this is dependent on how the drives are recognized by linux. Quote Link to comment
smino Posted April 16, 2009 Share Posted April 16, 2009 Right out of the box the card see all 8 drives properly, but Unraid does not see the drives. Back to PCI cards for now... Using Unraid Version 4.4.2. Same result with 4.5 Beta3 Linux 2.6.28.4 Quote Link to comment
erikatcuse Posted April 16, 2009 Share Posted April 16, 2009 You need to try 4.5beta4 which fixes the SAS bug and should at least let unraid see the drives. Also post a copy of your syslog with beta4 installed. You will probably have a bunch of HDIO_GET_IDENTITY errors due to a bug in the kernel which has been fixed in a new release of the kernel which Tom has indicated will be part of beta5. Quote Link to comment
smino Posted April 16, 2009 Share Posted April 16, 2009 Is 4.5 Beta stable enough for prod? Quote Link to comment
smino Posted April 16, 2009 Share Posted April 16, 2009 I do not see the drives with 4.5 Beta 4 either. Here is the syslog: Now I have not registered the dev version, even though I have a spare lic. left. Quote Link to comment
smino Posted April 16, 2009 Share Posted April 16, 2009 The Asus P5Q-E is a good pick, although it doesn't have onboard video. It does feature "Drive Xpert", an onboard controller that presents two disks in raid 0 or 1 to the OS as a single drive. This has been reported working in the latest unraid releases. A mirrored cache drive pair is a sought after feature for some users and this is the easiest way to do it. This is why I was looking into this a while ago. Hardware RAID0 or RAID1. The Drive Expert does make a significant difference on my rig, setup as raid0. See my post in the motherboard forum for the asus P5Q Deluxe. Quote Link to comment
cwr Posted April 16, 2009 Share Posted April 16, 2009 damn, and i was about to order one of these lucky i checked the forum first Quote Link to comment
Joe L. Posted April 16, 2009 Share Posted April 16, 2009 Is 4.5 Beta stable enough for prod? yes Quote Link to comment
erikatcuse Posted April 16, 2009 Share Posted April 16, 2009 Which drives did you have attached to the supermicro card? Also did you stop the array and go to the device page and see if the drive where available in the pull down menu? It looks like this card might need a different drive than is provided with unraid. Also when you boot do you see the supermicro bios screen? Quote Link to comment
smino Posted April 16, 2009 Share Posted April 16, 2009 I connected two drives to it, one on each port. The card see the drives in the bios. I went to the devices page to see if I could find either drive by serial number, and it did not show up. I left my card in so we can do quick tests in the future. I also look forward to seeing this card work. I might just build a stand alone linux version when I get a chance, and add the drivers. Has anyone else bought this card? Pretty impressive. It even has spin up groups to keep the watts down. I do not want to use my second lic for dev testing. I believe these were the two drives I had connected: I am not at home to verify. ata-ST3750640AS_5QD046F9 ata-ST3750640AS_5QD0CZSP Do you see them in the logs? Once this card works, I could easily go to 24 drives (25 physical drives using raid 0 on drive expert, of course my case can only take 20 drives right now, unless I modify the case to take a stack of 5 drives above the ps/cpu. But that is another topic. Quote Link to comment
erikatcuse Posted April 16, 2009 Share Posted April 16, 2009 I was able to take a closer look at your syslog and no the drives are not recognized. Also it doesn't look like the card itself is recognized either. The supermicro card uses the Marvell 6480 chip which needs the mvsas driver. I don't think that is included in unraid yet. The LSI card I have uses mptsas which is included in the unraid build. Taking a look online I found this which I believe is the driver needed. http://www.opensubscriber.com/message/[email protected]/8668946.html If you email Tom he might be able to get it into the next beta. Quote Link to comment
cwr Posted April 17, 2009 Share Posted April 17, 2009 having lspci would be handy and would confirm/deny if the card is being detected Quote Link to comment
Joe L. Posted April 17, 2009 Share Posted April 17, 2009 According to Tom, the driver will be in the next beta for this card. (and a few days ago he said the next beta should be out this week) http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3633.msg31746#msg31746 Quote Link to comment
smino Posted April 17, 2009 Share Posted April 17, 2009 Go Tom Go! Did I say how much I love the support in these forums and from Tom's Group. Take that Flexriad! Quote Link to comment
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