mnever33 Posted August 14, 2015 Share Posted August 14, 2015 Hello. I have just installed a new controller (Highpoint Rocket 620A) which is compatible with the unRAID Hardware List. It is a 2-port SATA III (6 Gbps) controller card and I bought it because all 5 SATA II ports of my motherboard (Intel DP45SG) are taken and I wanted to add a new WD 4TB Red hard drive... So I have 5 drives on the motherboard + 1 drive on the controller (6 drives total). As you can see in the photo, I get a SATA link down (ata6 and 10) message when I run the dmesg | grep SATA | grep link command. However I can see ALL the drives in the BIOS, as well as in the Device Identification page of unRAID (v5.0-rc11). Actually I'm Preclearing the new drive (/dev/sdf) right now... I use only one of the two ports of the card. I guess this is ata9 (6.0 Gbps, SStatus 133, SControl 330) ? What about ata6 and 10? What do they stand for and why are they down? Thank you... Link to comment
RobJ Posted August 14, 2015 Share Posted August 14, 2015 The full story is in the syslog, so that is what we need to see. Motherboard vendors add chipsets, then decide what connectors to provide, what capabilities to make available to the user. Your motherboard onboard disk controller chipset almost certainly supports 6 SATA ports, but apparently has only attached connectors for 5 of them. That could be one of the 'down' ports. The syslog will explain the rest. See my sig for more help. Link to comment
mnever33 Posted August 15, 2015 Author Share Posted August 15, 2015 My motherboard has 5 SATA2 ports +1 esata. But they always show as up! I attach the syslog after a successful Preclear of the new 4TB drive which I have just formatted and added to the data array. (the new data drive is identical to the parity drive: WD 4TB Red - WD40EFRX) Link to comment
RobJ Posted August 17, 2015 Share Posted August 17, 2015 I'm sorry, but that syslog is 0 bytes. Could you try again? Link to comment
mnever33 Posted August 20, 2015 Author Share Posted August 20, 2015 Oh, I'm so sorry RobJ, I don't know what happened! This is today's syslog, downloaded from unMENU... Thank you for your patience!.. syslog-2015-08-20.zip Link to comment
RobJ Posted August 21, 2015 Share Posted August 21, 2015 Syslog looks fine, no issues that I could see. You have 2 PATA ports (IDE ports on a Marvell chipset, ata1 and ata2), 6 motherboard SATA ports (ata3 through ata8), and 2 SATA ports on the card (ata9 and ata10). 5 drives are connected to onboard ports (all but the 4th port which is ata6) and one drive connected to the first card port (ata9). That leaves ata6 and ata10 with no drives connected, so they are down. All appears normal. Link to comment
mnever33 Posted August 21, 2015 Author Share Posted August 21, 2015 Nice to know that everything is ok! Thanks again my friend... If it's not too much trouble, can you please answer this question: As you can see in the photo of the first post, ata9 (port 1 of the SATA controller card) works at 6.0 Gbps speed and all the other onboard SATA ports work at 3.0 Gbps (SATA2). Should I put the Parity drive on the controller card or should I leave it on the motherboard? Would I gain anything (higher speeds? faster parity checks?) if I make this switch? All of my HDDs are SATA3. Thank you very much! Link to comment
RobJ Posted August 21, 2015 Share Posted August 21, 2015 From a spinning hard drive's point of view (not an SSD), there's not much difference between SATA II and SATA III, both are fast enough. However, it's always good to match fastest with fastest, so I would put the Parity drive on it. It typically uses the most bandwidth, when multiple drives are being accessed. A given users usage might make a difference though. If there's one fast drive that is used much more than the others, or you have a need for maximum speed from a particular drive, then that might be a better choice for the fastest connection. Link to comment
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