[SOLVED] Can a motherboard support more than 12 drives even with Controller...

[AngelEyes]

I am using an old ASUS P5E-VM HDMI motherboard: http://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards/P5EVM_HDMI/

 

I use 2 PCI sata controllers with 4 drives each to take me up to 11 drives (including my USB drive for the OS) and a PCIE 4 x controller for one more drive giving me 12 in total. If I add any further drives to my PCIE card they do not show up in the BIOS, so I am guessing there is some limit there?

 

Anyone have any ideas if this is a hardware limit or something I can work round maybe?

 

Thanks

 

Adam

 

ASUS P5E-VM HDMI

Q6600

2Gb Ram

Unraid 5.05

Cruzer Micro USB Drive

10 x Mix of WD & Hitachi HDD (2TB)

[Ford Prefect]

...what PCIex4 card are you using?

 

If this is a SAS/S-ATA HBA, it can have its own BIOS and then list the drives.

 

But, for use with unraid this doesn't matter at all....BIOS is needed for setting the boot-device (which is not  a disk for unraid anyway).

The linux driver will initialize the card(s) and disks upon boot and all drives should show.

So, IMHO this should not present an issue and you should be fine with adding more drives to the PCIex4 card.

[AngelEyes]

Thanks for the snappy response

 

The card is "AHCI SATA III - 6Gbps 4 ports SFF-8087 Mini-SAS PCIe Host Adapter"

 

Lycom PE-123i AHCI SATA III -6

 

I am guessing then the fact I haven't installed the Linux driver is my issue? 

 

I'll see if I can figure out how to do that (linux nube).

 

Thanks.

 

Adam

 

 

[AngelEyes]

Found the driver just have a question on installing it.

 

I have copied the driver over to the flash drive in a temp folder called driver.

 

The instructions say to instal via RPM but when I use the RPM command 'RPM-i #######.rpm' the server does not recognise the command.

 

Is RPM something I need to install first?

 

Also the instructions say I need to disable 'SELINUX'. Is that ok? (readme.txt is attached)

 

Thanks.

 

Adam

README.txt

[trurl]

Found the driver just have a question on installing it.

 

I have copied the driver over to the flash drive in a temp folder called driver.

 

The instructions say to instal via RPM but when I use the RPM command 'RPM-i #######.rpm' the server does not recognise the command.

 

Is RPM something I need to install first?

 

Also the instructions say I need to disable 'SELINUX'. Is that ok? (readme.txt is attached)

 

Thanks.

 

Adam

Don't have any experience with your hardware, but RPM is Redhat Package Manager, which is for a totally different OS than unRAID.

 

Don't know if it is possible to install drivers that haven't already been included with unRAID. If so it's probably pretty complicated.

[AngelEyes]

A little fiddling and the card seems to work fine without the drivers.

 

Thanks for the help ppl.

 

Adam

[Ford Prefect]

glad you're up&running.

...as you were already seeing the first disks, drivers included in unRAID have detected the card.

 

Don't know what chipset this card is based on, but it is already listed in the unRAID wiki as being compatible.

 

What "fiddling" did you do ...maybe this info would help others in the future.