Gigabyte JMB322 SATA Controllers on the MA790FXT-UD5P

[BryantD]

The JMB322 works in unRAID but the drive will not spindown. Also SMART does not seem to work. Any ideas?

[RobJ]

I have no personal experience with that chipset, and don't recall any actual usage experience mentioned before either.  In general, if SMART access is not working, then you can't issue spin downs to it either.  I would check for any BIOS options the card or chipset may have, and/or check for a newer BIOS for it.  If you can find a way to enable SMART on it, then spin downs should work also.

[WeeboTech]

That's a cool board.

Perhaps the Port Multiplier is not passing the commands through correctly because of BIOS Settings (as mentioned before).

You may have to change the JMB322 to be JBOD.

Make sure you are not in RAID1 or RAID0 mode. I know with Silicon Image. you cannot get SMART or power status if the chipset and drives are in a raid mode.

 

[BryantD]

That's a cool board.

Perhaps the Port Multiplier is not passing the commands through correctly because of BIOS Settings (as mentioned before).

You may have to change the JMB322 to be JBOD.

Make sure you are not in RAID1 or RAID0 mode. I know with Silicon Image. you cannot get SMART or power status if the chipset and drives are in a raid mode.

 

 

I have tried Big (JBOD) and Normal (Port Multiplier) with no luck regarding SMART. Not sure what else to try. Ideas?

[Guzzi]

I have made trials with JMB chipsets in the past - and was NOT happy with it. I finally switched to SIL3132 PCIe adapters - they work flawless for me and fully support portmultipliers (giving 10 ports per PCIe slot) plus smart, spindown and FIS based switching (vs. command based switching with older JMB chipset - not good for raid-5 or Unraid-paritycheck).

Although stated, I never got PMs properly up and running with intel ICH chipsets.

So Sil-3132 with Sil-3726 PMs is the only combination so far I know to work without flaws.

I would be interested if anybody gets those 3726 based PMs properly running with onboard chipsets - fully supported...

[BryantD]

I am not using the JMB322 for PM's; I just want to use the SATA2 ports on the JMB322 for HDD's in my unRAID. They will work if you don't care about SMART and spindown (hopefully someone can fiqure out how to make these features work). My case will hold 18 HD's w/o modification and with my 2 Adaptec 1430SA's, the 6 SATA2 on the MB (not counting the 4 SATA2 on the 2 JMB322's) and 2 SI3132 cards I have 18 SATA2 ports on the PCI-e bus. I still have a spare PCI-ex1 slot available.

 

If there is a way to get the JMB322 chipset to use SMART the MA790FXT-UD5P is almost a perfect unRAID MB (only lacking built-in video). The 2 PCI-ex16 video slots can be used for the Adaptec 1430SA and with 3 PCI-ex1 slots for SI3132 cards thats a potential of 24 SATA2 ports on the PCI-e bus. It can use the 45W AMD Sempron 140 Sargas (plus this board will unlock the 2nd core) and has 2 PCI-e GLan ports.