In need of some help with Supermirco motherboard issues

[rmilyard]

So I purchased a Supermicro X11SAT-F-O motherboard.  I got this since I wanted to use the NVMe support this board offered.  Also I have a new Xeon E3-1275v6 CPU and 64gb of DDR4 ECC ram.  From day one I had some issues with the board.  Random stuff etc.  Then after having Jon from Lime-Tech remote it with me it stopped booting.  I would get stuck at dxe--bios pci bus enumeration 90.  Jon suggested I pull all the cards etc and try that.  Well after hours of testing same thing.  Next day it started working again.  So now I was thinking something with motherboard.  I replaced the board and got same one and same revision.  Well same issue.  Then after few times it stuck at USB initialization 62.  Never gets pass this.  So put old one back in and now same issue!

 

So I am going to replace this board with only other I find the has NVMe, Xeon v6 support and enough PCIE slots for my 2 LSI HBA cards and 10gbe NIC.  I am ordering an Asus P10S WS.  

 

My question is now unRAID.  Can I put the USB in a still boot?  Also how about all my drives?  I had 14 data drives, 2 parity drives, 2 500gb SSD Cache drives and 1 NVMe.  I don't want to lose all my data on this 72tb of storage.

 

Also since I can't get server to boot I don't know what the drive assignments are.

 

Please advice me ASAP!

[Wody]

I don't know about the hardware-issues, but unRAID is designed just for stuff like that. Basically, assuming your issue is with the motherboard, and the Asus one doesn't have it, plug everything in, and things should just work, assuming you are running unRAID 5 or 6, because these look for the serial-numbers of the drives for the assigned order.

Also, don't forget that you can always boot up almost any linux distribution and access all data on the drives, so there is no reason you would lose access to any of it in case you need a backup of it.

[rmilyard]

1 minute ago, Wody said:

I don't know about the hardware-issues, but unRAID is designed just for stuff like that. Basically, assuming your issue is with the motherboard, and the Asus one doesn't have it, plug everything in, and things should just work, assuming you are running unRAID 5 or 6, because these look for the serial-numbers of the drives for the assigned order.

Also, don't forget that you can always boot up almost any linux distribution and access all data on the drives, so there is no reason you would lose access to any of it in case you need a backup of it.

 

Good lord hope don’t need backup 72tb of data. Hopefully it’s easy. Never had this type of issues. 

[Wody]

unRAID/RAID is not a backup! So yes, you do need a backup. But there is no reason you'd lose any data just because unRAID isn't working, unlike regular RAID where drive-failure or lost controller can mean you lose all of it. So don't worry, only if you have multiple-drive failure, you'd lose the data on those drives. Anything else can be replaced without any loss (but like I said, do make a backup of your unraid USB in case you need the configuration, and having backups of data is the right thing to do as well).

[rmilyard]

Also since needed change board was thinking switching the 2 SAS2008 cards was using to pair pcie 3.0 SAS2308 ones. Hope this isn’t an issue. 

[Wody]

Both the 2008 and 2308 seem to have the same interfaces with regards to drives, so it is possible you won't notice any differences regarding speed although the 2308 seems faster and newer.

As to issues, there won't be any, as long as you're using unRAID 5 or newer, since those track the serials of the drive. So it should be plug and play.

Don't forget to flash the 2308's to IT-mode if they aren't on that already.