AOC-USAS2-L8I Compatibility

[agheno]

I just installed my AOC-USAS2-L8I card and am having some trouble getting into the configuration menu. As I understand, this is a somewhat common problem among non-supermicro motherboards and I'm attempting to use it in an ASRock z68 Extreme4.

When prompted, I press CTRL-C to trigger configuration menu but it does not activate. According to another forum, "rumour has it that it is something about the bios not trapping interrupt 19. So the ctrl-c is never passed to the card bios."

Anyhow, I'd like to build a compatibility list. For those of you that have this card (SAS2 revision), what motherboards have you had success with?

 

[diizzy]

I'm not by any means going to scare you bit you might want to prepare yourself for a rather bumpy ride...

What you probably need to do if you want to access WebBIOS is to first press the key combo to activate it and then at the bios boot bring up the boot menu and choose the card. This is at least what I needed to do on my Intel DG45ID motherboard. If/When you manage to configure your card cross your fingers that it likes your motherboard because LSI adapters are very picky. If you can boot Windows without getting any errors regarding low memory you've passed the first trial and if you get "Device cannot start" in device manager after loading/installing drivers you're screwed, at least using that motherboard. I personally got stuck at the driver issue, the only workaround which actually made my card (IBM ServeRAID M1015) more useful was that it could be flashed to a "dumb" controller card rather than a RAID adapter. After finding a motherboard that would accept my card for flashing it worked flawlessly in the Intel motherboard.

Good luck

//Danne

 

[agheno]

I'm running Solaris (Open-Indiana Live-DVD for now), and it loads the driver and detects the attached drives just fine. I'm just worried about not being able to access the card's configuration in case I need to further down the line.

There is apparently a CLI utility, SAS2IRCU, that will allow some (or maybe all) management functions from the OS. I'll be testing it shortly. (http://www.supermicro.com/support/faqs/faq.cfm?faq=9633)

It would still be nice to have a compatibility list or future users of this chipset.

-edit-

Is there any reason I would need to access the the configuration menu if all I am looking to do is use the card as an HBA to feed ZFS a bunch of drives? I saw some timing options available under the advanced configuration... is there any reason to adjust that?