Some background, my 13 drive plus parity plus cache system had been running with 6 drives on the MB SATA ports, 8 drives on a Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 PCI-e x4 controller, and the final drive on a 2 port PCI-e x1 SATA card.

 

Recently the SASLP went bad and I just swapped it out with its replacement AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 which is a PCI-E x8 variant.

 

When I booted it up the first time, the system hung up on the 2 port PCI-e x1 SATA card. It showed the bios screen from that card but never moved on. After reseating everything and trying again, same problem.

 

I swapped the 2 port card to a different PCI-e x1 slot and everything booted up and seemed to be fine. Then I noticed that my cache drive is not showing up - and that is the one that is on the 2 port card. I've moved the card around to different PCI-e x1 slots (3 of them) and even tried the other PCI-e x16 slot that the SASLP is not using. Depending on which slot it is in, either the 2 port card shows up before the SASLP during boot and the system hangs, or the card never shows up.

 

All this is happening before UNRAID starts, so I'm not sure if there is anything helpful in my log but I'm attaching it anyways. But if anyone has any ideas on how to sort of this apparent conflict between my new SAS2LP and my 2 port card, I would appreciate it.

syslog-new setup.txt

I played around with this today. It is a gigabyte GA-MA780G-UD3H with 2 x16 slots (one running at x4) and 3 x1 slots. Two of the x1 slots are disabled if an x4 card is installed in the second x16 slot. Anyways, I had the x8 SASLP card in the x16 slot, and I tried the Syba x1 2 port SATA card in all the other slots (including the second x16 (x4) slot. In some slots, the Syba card's BIOS would show up first and hang. In other slots the SASLP would show up, but the Syba card never did.

 

I finally moved the SASLP into the second x16 slot (running x4 even though it is an x8 card) and put the Syba card in the first x16 slot. That boots up properly, the SASLP card shows up first, then the Syba card shows up and everything boots and I can finally access the cache drive.

 

Unfortunately in this config the x8 SASLP card is crippled a bit running x4, but that's what my previous card was so at least I'm not going backwards.

I looked through the BIOS and could not find anything that looked like it would change boot priorities or anything for the PCI-e slots so I'm out of ideas. I may get another 4TB drive and merge a couple of my older 1.5TB drives then put the cache on the SASLP and get rid of the Syba card altogether. But if anyone ever thinks of anything else, please let me know.