Thats because your norco has the sas connection for the hard drives. For what he is getting the controller has the sas connection and from what i understand you need the forward breakout sas to 4 sata cable unless he has sas connection for his hard drives.

 

It even says so in the newegg

 

With this cable, the SFF-8087 connector can NOT be plugged into a SAS HBA or RAID adapter, and the 4xSata connectors can NOT be plugged into SATA hard drives. It's the other way around

 

Sorry EMKO, I meant for my post to confirm that reverse break outs functioned that way, not directly connected to the drives.

So let me get this straight, the Supermicro card only has two SFF-8087 connectors and you use a 4 breakout cable to connect 4 SATA hard drives to each connector?  Based on the posts above, I guess you would need a "forward" SFF-8087 to SATA 4x breakout to take advantage of all the controllers in each connector?  Means 2 forward cables with 4x breakout gives you a total of 8 SATA drives per card...sound right?

As instructed, please find attached the syslog for 4.5 Final.  I just ran through the updates to see where it fails:

 

4.5b13 works fine

4.5 final works fine (bzimage and root appear the same as 4.5b13)

4.5.1 does not work and has the same error as 4.5.3

 

Regards,  Peter

 

Peter,

 

Seems like you are having the exact same problem as me.  Any developments on your end?  Would like to know what I should do.

I reverted to 4.5 Final and am in a holding pattern awaiting for further instructions from Tom.  Are you running the same hardware?

 

Regards,  Peter

My speeds have completely tanked since 4.5 -> 4.5.3

 

Using a cache drive, I went from decent write speed over the network to 1-2MB/s write. Pretty horrendous.

 

Probably reverting back to 4.5

 

Update:

Reverted back to 4.5 (simply renamed my bzroot-4.5 and bzimage-4.5 backups to the original names), rebooted the server and proceeded to copy the exact same 23GB of data to my server.. ETA was 2 hours.. On 4.5.3, the same 23GB had an ETA of 3-4 hours.

 

Like I said, tanked.

Nothing else changed.. I guess I could take a look at the syslog from 4.5.3, but I'm not sure what, if anything of importance would cause this issue.

 

 

 

Can someone please explain something about the Norco 4020 and Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8. Looking at the card, there are 8 SATA I/II connectors. So, why am I reading about the special breakout cables, like NORCO C-SFF8087-4S? the regular SATA cables will not work? Sorry for the confusion.

 

Lev

Can someone please explain something about the Norco 4020 and Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8. Looking at the card, there are 8 SATA I/II connectors. So, why am I reading about the special breakout cables, like NORCO C-SFF8087-4S? the regular SATA cables will not work? Sorry for the confusion.

 

Lev

 

The card actually has 2 SAS connectors. You need the breakout cable to "expand" the 2 SAS connectors to 8 SATA. The breakout cables are SAS to SATA and you can have 4 per connector. If you look at the pictures for this card closely, you'll see there's only 2 connectors.

 

My speeds have completely tanked since 4.5 -> 4.5.3

 

Using a cache drive, I went from decent write speed over the network to 1-2MB/s write. Pretty horrendous.

 

Probably reverting back to 4.5

 

Update:

Reverted back to 4.5 (simply renamed my bzroot-4.5 and bzimage-4.5 backups to the original names), rebooted the server and proceeded to copy the exact same 23GB of data to my server.. ETA was 2 hours.. On 4.5.3, the same 23GB had an ETA of 3-4 hours.

 

Like I said, tanked.

Nothing else changed.. I guess I could take a look at the syslog from 4.5.3, but I'm not sure what, if anything of importance would cause this issue.

 

I am curious to take a look at your 4.5 and 4.5.3 syslogs, and also at your 'go' script.

 

I too had the initial unformatted messages across all drives (except cache) when I upgraded from 4.5.1 to 4.5.3, but a restart fixed this.

 

Speed increase is tremendous

 

Using cache drive I was averaging about 30-35MB/s and now I'm getting 45-65MB/s using Teracopy. If does make a hell of a difference when you've got a lot of big files to move around.

 

Thanks,

 

Glen.

r.e. the cables for the 8-port Supermicro board  ==>  These are the Supermicro "I-Pass" cables that SuperMicro sells for this board:  http://www.provantage.com/supermicro-cbl-0118l-02~7SUPA01Q.htm

 

They're back-ordered at Provantage (best price), but are in stock at a few other retailers for a few $$ more ... e.g.

http://www.nextwarehouse.com/item/?344675_g10e

Tom,

 

Have you done speed test comparisons between otherwise identical systems using the AOC-SASLP-MV8 card vs. the 1430SA cards?    I'm anxious to finish my build, but am torn between these two options.

 

I'm also a bit concerned about the several posts in this thread noting significant slowdowns in network speeds with 4.5.3 => in fact my experimental 3-drive system has the same issue, but I made some network topology changes at the same time, so I've not yet confirmed it was due to the UnRAID upgrade.    I'm less concerned about that than just wanting to be sure I use the "best" add-in SATA card option.

 

For those having network slowdown speeds, were your NICs configured for Gigabit speeds after the upgrade? Also, what CPU/RAM/NICs are used?

 

Using cache drive I was averaging about 30-35MB/s and now I'm getting 45-65MB/s using Teracopy. If does make a hell of a difference when you've got a lot of big files to move around.

 

Hi betgear,

 

I just tried Teracopy after reading your post and with Windows7 64bit I actually find the stock windows copy is a couple of MB/s faster on multiple 4GB+ files (28MB/s vs 25MB/s on a GB network bypassing user shares writing to a specific 2TB WD EADS disk on a Celeron 420E 1.6GHz w/1GB RAM).  YMMV.

I just tried Teracopy after reading your post and with Windows7 64bit I actually find the stock windows copy is a couple of MB/s faster on multiple 4GB+ files (28MB/s vs 25MB/s on a GB network bypassing user shares writing to a specific 2TB WD EADS disk on a Celeron 420E 1.6GHz w/1GB RAM).  YMMV.

 

I'd give up the 3MB/s extra speed to get the CRC checking of TeraCopy. I always do post copy validation with TeraCopy just to make sure the CRC's match before I go deleting files from their original location.

 

Yes I am paranoid

r.e. the cables for the 8-port Supermicro board  ==>  These are the Supermicro "I-Pass" cables that SuperMicro sells for this board:  http://www.provantage.com/supermicro-cbl-0118l-02~7SUPA01Q.htm

 

They're back-ordered at Provantage (best price), but are in stock at a few other retailers for a few $$ more ... e.g.

http://www.nextwarehouse.com/item/?344675_g10e

 

What is the difference, with the exception of the connectors between:

 

SUPERMICRO AOC-SASLP-MV8  http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?name=AOC-SASMV8#

 

and

 

SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815121009

 

It seems that both cards offer 8 device connectivity. Both cost roughly the same, however, the first card also needs 2 additional $15 cables, whereas the second looks like has 8 regular SATA connectors. For the unRAID purposes is there any significant difference?

 

Thanks,

 

Lev

 

What is the difference, with the exception of the connectors:

PCI-X vs. PCI-e

 

What is the difference, with the exception of the connectors:

PCI-X vs. PCI-e

 

For the unRAID purposes, is there a significant speed improvement in using the PCI-X card? On the other hand, the cost of a new "server class" motherboard is probably not realistic for marginal performance gains.

PCI-X works in a regular PCI slot.... when you do so, you restrict bandwith.

The PCIe card will give you better parity check speeds than the PCI-X card in a PCI slot.

 

Basically using the PCI-X card in a PCI slot, it give you slower parity checks that the PCIe card, but it will not have much if any effect on regular reads and writes.

As BubbaQ noted, you'll "restrict bandwidth" if you use a PCI-X card in a PCI slot ==> but it's a BIG restriction ...

 

PCI has a 133MB/s (1Gb/s) bandwidth.

 

PCI-X has 8 to 32 times the bandwidth of PCI, depending on the PCI-X version of your system.  So using a PCI-X card in a PCI slot results in no better than 1/8th of the bandwidth the card is designed for.

 

A 4-lane PCIe card will have performance in the same range as PCI-X ... and is better if you think you may use more than one card, as the PCIe bus isn't shared (as long as there are ample lanes available -- which there easily are for a few x4 cards in an UnRAID system.

 

I agree with BubbaQ's comment that for typical reads it makes no difference;  for writes it would depend on whether or not the disk being written to is on the same controller as the parity drive;  and of course for parity calculations it would make a BIG difference (probably in the neighborhood of 4x as long to compute parity).

 

Also, note that the breakout cable used for the SAS card allows a "cleaner" cable routing in the system, as there are only 2 cables instead of 4 in the motherboard area.    Also, if you build a system with a backplane system that uses the quad SAS connectors, you don't use a breakout cable -- in which case the cabling is MUCH neater (only one cable with a single connector at each end for every 4 drives).

 

PCI has a 133MB/s (1Gb/s) bandwidth.

 

I believe that 133MB/s bandwidth must also be shared between all PCI devices on most motherboards vs. PCI-e getting dedicated bandwidth per slot/device.

 

r.e. the cables for the 8-port Supermicro board  ==>  These are the Supermicro "I-Pass" cables that SuperMicro sells for this board:  http://www.provantage.com/supermicro-cbl-0118l-02~7SUPA01Q.htm

 

They're back-ordered at Provantage (best price), but are in stock at a few other retailers for a few $$ more ... e.g.

http://www.nextwarehouse.com/item/?344675_g10e

 

Has anyone seen these cables with right angle SATA connectors?  My backplane doesn't really allow for the straight connectors.  I did find these http://www.xpcgear.com/multi-lane-sff-8087-mini-sas-to-4x-sata-right-angle-internal-data-hard-drive-forward-break-out-cable.html but they're kind of expensive.

Has anyone seen these cables with right angle SATA connectors?  My backplane doesn't really allow for the straight connectors.  I did find these http://www.xpcgear.com/multi-lane-sff-8087-mini-sas-to-4x-sata-right-angle-internal-data-hard-drive-forward-break-out-cable.html but they're kind of expensive.

 

The xpcgear cable seems like it's just what you need =>  they're a bit more expensive than some, but right-angle cables are often a bit more expensive .. and it DOES do exactly what you need 

 

Yeah, I guess in the grand scheme it's not that big of a deal.  I was just hoping there might be at least one other alternative.  After some extensive searching, this was all I could find.

Just upgraded from 4.5 to 4.5.3. Everything boots fine except that UnRAID can no longer read the GUID of my USB key properly so server boots up as Basic edition and only 3 drives are shown... 

 

Read that there were some changes to the way the GUID is read..could this have affected me?