Hi there,

 

So I'm a new UnRAID user, and am still trying to get everything set-up. Bought myself a xeon Dell T20, 4 x 4tb WD Reds and a Startech pexsat32 SATA card, plus an old 120gb Intel 320 SSD.

 

So I put 2 of the Reds in first, along with the SSD as the cache and got it all set-up as a test, seemed to work well (including installing Ubuntu as a vm). I then added the SATA card with the remaining 2 Reds on it, and suddenly it seems to have all gone wrong.

 

Now, when I start it the drives on the SATA card won't appear in UnRAID at all, and the SSD is now unmountable. I put a screen on the system as it booted and saw a loaf of error messages saying about how the drives are running at just 1.5gbps for some reason.

 

Will attach the syslog. Really appreciate any suggestions!

tmp_1076-dougnas2-diagnostics-20161113-20001609923902.zip

It looks as though this may be your problem: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=40683.0

 

Ahh yes, thank you. That certainly looks like the error I was getting.

 

If I disable virtualisation in the bios, then would I not have issues running VMs on the machine?

Ahh yes, thank you. That certainly looks like the error I was getting.

 

If I disable virtualisation in the bios, then would I not have issues running VMs on the machine?

Yes. You will need to get a more compatible HBA if you want to run VM's.

I believe you only need to turn off VT-d, which controls IOMMU. You can leave basic virtualisation (VT-x) enabled which allows you still to run simple VMs but if you want to pass through hardware devices to your VMs you need VT-d enabled and will need a different solution for your problem.

 

Basically the choices are:

 

1. try the work-round decribed in that thread (which may or may not work);

2. turn off VT-d and forego the passing through of hardware devices;

3. replace your Marvell-based SATA controller with, for example, an ASM1061-based card.

 

Fab, thank you all very much for the help.

 

I do actually have a 9211-8i card which I can use, but I was sticking to the other one just for ease. I need to flash it to IT mode, and read somewhere that they run a bit hot... but perhaps I should just get on with it!

The LSI card is very popular and works well with unRAID. It's a nuisance that it needs to be re-flashed and the process, though documented in detail in this huge thread, is somewhat more difficult than it really ought to be. Some people have had to switch to a different motherboard in order to complete the operation.

So just to give a little update, you were absolutely spot-on about the virtualisation. I disabled 'VT for Direct I/O' in the BIOS and the system booted with no errors and the drives were immediately all present and correct in UnRAID.

 

With the unmountable cache SSD, it seems that was a different issue just rearing its head at the same time. I tried to format the thing, but after about 40mins of formatting it basically just stopped formatting, with the drive still unmountable. I then tried adding the drive to the array, and only then I started getting a load of drive errors from the thing. Think I need a new SSD! With Black Friday and all that next week, think I'll wait and see if anything good goes on offer.

OK. Glad to hear that you're getting back on track.