I have 3 AOC-SASLP-MV8 (please note it is not the AOC-SAS2LP-MV8) with BIOS 3.1.0.21.  When the cards are POSTing, only the first 2 cards are going through their spinup/drive detection routine and if I go into the BIOS for the controller, only 2 cards are shown (and only 2 of the cards light up their LEDs).  When unraid boots and the driver loads it sees all three cards (the 3rd card "comes to life") and everything works fine.  It seems either the controller BIOS only supports 2 cards at boot or it could be something weird about the MB (I have all unneeded onboard features disabled).  I'm inclined to ignore it since everything works but I'd like to know if anyone has seen the same behavior.

Interesting behavior.  This may be a function of the PCI lane structure on your motherboard.

 

What motherboard do you have? ... and which slots are these cards plugged in to?

 

I'd tend to agree with your conclusion => all's working well, so just ignore it 

The MB is an  ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/FM2A85X%20Extreme6/ (latest BIOS 2.30).

 

The MB has 4 PCI-E x16 (physical) slots, when all 3 are in use the max logical speed is 8x/8x/4x and since the AOC-SASLP-MV8 is a 4 lane card, I'm covered.  If you look at the picture of the board the slots are prioritized from the bottom up so the first card to init (and the BIOS that is loaded) is the bottom-most slot and the second card is the middle one and finally the top card is last and the one that does not appear during POST.  Incidentally, from the bottom-up the slot speeds are x4/x8/x8.  I thought the slot speed might (although I can't see why it would) play into it but it must not since the 2 cards that come up during POST are in different speed slots. The three AOC-SASLP-MV8s are the only cards in the system.

I only see (and the manual says it has) 3 PCIe x16 slots -- not 4.    But as you noted, they should be running at x8, x8, and x4, so there are as many lanes as your cards need.

 

I looked through your manual at every reference to the PCIe slots, and can find no reason why there should be a recognition issue.    This MAY be some setting in the BIOS that needs to be "tweaked";  or it may be a function of the BIOS on the SASLP-MV8's  (are they all at the same BIOS level?).

 

In any event, since they're working fine once UnRAID initializes them, I'd just leave well enough alone unless you have mismatched BIOS versions on the cards (which could explain what's happening).

 

That was a typo should have been 3.  I'll check the BIOS versions tomorrow, I'll have to remove or swap the cards around since there does not seem to be a way to see the version number other than in the POST screen; if they're all the same version I'll review the MB BIOS settings and see in anything looks promising there.