I received and installed today two Digitus DS-30104-1 SATA 3 PCI express cards (http://www.lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Hardware_Compatibility#PCI_SATA_Controllers)

 

I connected 3 HDDs on them, 2 2TB WD RE and 1 2TB WD Green (2 disks on one contrller, 1 disk on the other). During system boot, in motherboard's BIOS they are listed as IDEs. In the controllers' BIOS they are listed as AHCI configured 3GB/s SATA disks.

 

During unRAID startup I see a lot of errors and tries / failures. When the system is up, the disks are not listed anywhere for preclearing / adding in the array.

 

I suppose that the relevant issues are with ata10,16 and 24. There are a few recurring link speed changes from 3GB/s to 1,5GB/s, qc timeouts and failures to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4).

 

There are some other ata issues on non-connected (?) ports which make no sense.

 

There is no clear reason to me why this is happening. The cards are in the compatibility list and the manual shows them as Linux compatible for 2.6.x. Could it be a driver compatibility issue, or a configuration setting?

 

Attached you can see the whole boot log. I also attached a few screenshots from the controller's BIOS menu which shows the HDDs as usable drives.

 

I would appreciate any help you can give me.

tower-syslog-20160323-1950.zip

Possible Marvell virtualization issue:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=40683.0

 

Try the workaround.

Possible Marvell virtualization issue:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=40683.0

 

Try the workaround.

 

Excellent johnie.black (and ofcourse Robj), all issues disappeared and I am now Preclearing (another excellent tool) all 3 HDDs.

 

Thank you for your prompt answer.

 

Christos.