[SOLVED!!] - Cannot get SATA Add-on Cards to Work

[hernandito]

I am upgrading a friend's 2 year old unRAID machine with a new motherboard, cpu, ram, and new SATA controller card. I have maxed out the 6 ports on the motherboard, and want to add additional hard drives.

 

I have tried 3 SATA Adapters without any luck. The new motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-H97M-DH3 with a new i7 CPU. the Mobo has one PCIe-16x slot, two PCI slots, and one PCIe x4 slot.

 

First I tried a SY-SA3114-4R which uses a Sil3114 chipset on both PCI slots. Card would somewhat recognize a hard drive attached (my cache drive) and after a minute or 2, the computer would freeze up, requiring pressing of the power switched. Nothing else worked. On 2 occasions, the cache drive connected to the card would corrupt the hard drive requiring a re-format and rebuilding of the data. I found an old link on how to downgrade the card firmware and I was able to do that, but the same problem occurred with the new bios. I have 2 of these cards on my personal unRAID machine with an older mobo and they work perfectly fine.

 

Next I tried a new SYBA  PCI-e version 2.0, x2 slot card from IOCREST, which uses the newest Marvell 88SE9230 Chipset single chip 4-port Gen III 6Gb/s host controller. This time I connected a pre-cleared new 4TB hard drive (did not want to risk the cache drive again). The hard drives were not recognized by unRAID, and the Unassigned Devices just kept spinning and spinning. Stopping the array showed no available drive not being used.

 

I rebooted and w/ Ctrl-M got into the bios of the card. Not much to configure in there, and it showed that the one drive connected was set to RAID 0.

 

Last, I tried a StarTech 4port PCIe SATA 3 6Gbps RAID controller card. from here:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815158365&cm_re=pexsat34rh-_-15-158-365-_-Product

Basically same behavior as the card above. It would not recognize any drives connected to the card.

 

I am at a loss, and don't know what to do. The motherboard bios has no settings for SATA other than IDE, AHCI, or RAID. I tried both AHCI and IDE with the Marvell 88SE9230 Chipset card. No luck.

 

 

I have been at this for nearly a week. I have bought 3 cards and nothing. I know I could buy one of those Supermicro 8 port cards, but I feel that I will run into the same issue.

 

Can anyone please shed some light on this. 

 

Many thanks,

 

H.

 

PS. With the Marvell 88SE9230 Chipset card, I see this as I boot to unRAID: (sorry for blurryness)

 

http://i.imgur.com/ZAHV0dk.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

[JorgeB]

I have a Lycom PE-120 witch I believe uses the same marvell 9230 chip, I remember it didn’t work on early v6 versions but appears to be working fine in 6.1.2, I still get an emask error on the log but it appears to be harmless, related to a virtual device.

 

Because of the virtualization bug with some marvell chips you may want to try disabling it in your bios, although for me works with it enable or disable.

 

[hernandito]

I have a Lycom PE-120 witch I believe uses the same marvell 9230 chip, I remember it didn’t work on early v6 versions but appears to be working fine in 6.1.2, I still get an emask error on the log but it appears to be harmless, related to a virtual device.

 

Because of the virtualization bug with some marvell chips you may want to try disabling it in your bios, although for me works with it enable or disable.

 

Johnnie.... it worked!!! Disabling virtualization in the bios did it... what a great releief.

 

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

 

     

[RobJ]

For a little more info on this, see Marvell disk controller chipsets and virtualization.

[fbeserve]

Which SATA controller did you end up using and what kind of speeds are you seeing?  Need to get a new card and was looking at the Startech.com PEXSAT34RH which led me to your post.