Sharing my interesting experience with a pci-e usb3 controller in unraid

[aptalca]

Hi guys,

 

I had a rather interesting experience installing a pci-e usb3 card in unraid (it didn't work properly) and wanted to share it here so other folks can find it in the future if they are having similar issues.

 

I have a Supermicro X9SRL-F motherboard paired with an E5-2670v1 (yes I jumped on the $69 ebay bonanza).

 

Now that I have a server capable of vt-d and an ultra fast processor, I wanted to make this ready for Oculus (if I decide to get one in the near future). But the board has no usb3 ports and Oculus requires 3.

 

So I bought the Oculus recommended Inateck branded pci-e card and popped it in. It worked in unraid 6.1.9, all ports were recognized all devices worked.

 

When I tried to shutdown the server a week later, a nasty surprise. 3 seconds after shutdown, the mobo restarts itself. It took me a while before I relized it was this card causing it. You can imagine the issue with that. During a power outage, ups/apcupsd shuts down the server cleanly, but then the server boots back up. When the ups dies, potential data loss  :'(

 

I popped the card into my backup unraid server (different mobo) and it worked fine. Clean shutdowns, no restart. So I thought maybe the issue was an incompatibility with the Supermicro board on my new machine.

 

After some e-mail exchanges with the company's support, I decided to install windows and see what happens (they strongly urged me to test in windows).

 

I unplugged all the hdds from the Supermicro and plugged in a drive with windows. The shutdowns were clean, no restarts. So it had to be an issue with the OS+mobo combo.

 

Before I gave up and returned the card, I had a lightbulb moment. What if I pass the card through to a windows vm? Would it work then? I had to try.

 

I used saarg's method and passed it through to a Win10 vm. Windows picked it right up, auto installed the drivers and everything worked.

 

When I shut down the server, it stayed off 

 

I realize that I won't be able to ever reliably use that card in unRAID but only in a VM, but that's ok, because I got it mainly for Oculus, and I would use a windows vm for Oculus anyway.

 

Cheers

[xccrev]

I've had some pretty odd experiences with this card as well both on 6.1.9 and 6.2-23 beta. It behaved fine when I passed it through to a Windows VM for a long time. However, I made some system changes (I upgraded my GPU), and then it was causing massive system instability. System hangs, etc. I've been able to reliably pass in the card when there are no usb devices plugged in. But If I try to start the VM with usb devices plugged in, however, I have pretty disastrous results. There are times too when the card seems to be the cause of very high CPU utilization.

 

I've tried stubbing the card out in the syslinux.cfg so that unraid doesn't address it...which didn't really work either.

 

Kinda frustrating because there aren't any other recommended PCI usb cards for oculus.... and currently passing the oculus usb devices through the vm gui individually isn't working for me (I'm running the 6.2-23).

 

I'd be interested in hearing your further experience with this card, and if it has been able to work consistently for you.