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Project: Galaxy 4.75

coolrunner, there was another thread somewhere on [H] that gave some steps to steps from basic SATA to AHCI that might work with WHS. In the thread, Old Hippie quoted the following:

With the Intel controller set on IDE mode, go into device manager and locate the Intel controller that the drive is connected to. Right-click and select upgrade driver. Select browse my computer for driver software. Select let me pick from list. In the screen untick the box "show compatible hardward". Scroll down under the Manufactuer column and select the Standard AHCI driver and select next. This should install the Microsoft AHCI driver. (Alternatively, you can install the latest Intel AHCI driver at this time if you have it handy using the "Have Disk" button.) Reboot. Then go into the bios and change your Intel controller from IDE to AHCI. Once your reboot you can then install the AHCI driver for your particular motherboard. This is assuming you are running Vista, I'm not sure if XP has default Microsoft AHCI drivers available.
Click to expand...

Those steps seemed to work for someone in the thread. Maybe it'll work.
 
Ockie, that's one sweet rack of equipment. I look forward to hearing how well things are going with it all and WHS months from now.
 
It is actually too late for me to try that since I formatted the system drive already.

I tried it again, and this time I paid attention when the BSOD occurs. The problem is that after the first reboot it starts the Windows installation, and cannot find the HDD. I need to F6 and install the driver so that it can see it. Which I can't do since I don't have a floppy drive anywhere.

I really could care less about AHCI. I would be happy with IDE, but it does not seem to recognize all the SATA ports in that mode.

I think the best thing to do is wait for Ockie's response since he has this board.
 
coolrunner84 said:
Sorry I was not clear, I am referring to the red ports on the Biostar motherboard.
Click to expand...

Ahh yes, I will address this question below on your next quote.

alcuin said:
Ockie what's your wife's email address... methinks she needs to see some pictures. Obviously she hasn't been in the basement yet, eh? :)
Click to expand...

LOL. There is on place where the wife doesn't tread.. thats the basement. Well the garage too.

n1ce_hat said:
Master Ockie, I have a question..

What do you think is the minimum rated power supply to be used in a... Galaxy? I have two power supplies that I can donate to my Galaxy cause, but i'm not sure if they can hack it under the pressure of 20 spinning disks.

#1 is a Zalman ZM600 (600w)
#2 is a Thermaltake w0049 (680w)

Do you think I should move to a larger supply?
Click to expand...

Personally I would be okay with those PSU's, 600-680 should be enough to run a 20 drive system. I'm running 750w psu's and they are more than enough with lots of room to spare. It's going to really depend on your configuration, obviously if you have dual quad xeons and a stack of memory and raid controllers, then I would suggest upgrading.

coolrunner84 said:
Ockie,

I think it is better if I explain what exactly has happened.

I installed WHS with SATA Mode select set to "SATA" in the motherboard bios. Everything went smoothly, and I did not get a BSOD during the installation.

Then while I was adding drives to WHS, I could not get it to recognize any drive connected to the red ports on the Biostar motherboard. The only way the board would see those drives would be if I set SATA Mode select to "AHCI" in the bios of the motherboard. Of course, when I did this WHS would no longer load.

Since I had not transferred that much data I decided to try a reinstall with AHCI selected. Once I set this and started the reinstall, it BSOD during the first step.

At this point, I don't know what to do. Any advice would be appreciated.
Click to expand...

Ahh yes, I ran into the same issue.

I'll put this really short for you: You can't use the raid ports. There is no work around, there is no other options, you either have the choice of runing RAID-AHCI, or the SATA mode. I found some Biostar documents explaining that the board wont support all 6 ports, those two ports are raid exlusive... you can only use the 4 ports or the 2 raid ports basically.

I've tried arguing different by forcing AHCI and other options, but it results in a BSOD (same as you have recieved).
 
Storage Pimp Club: ockie, odditory, alcuin, LittleMe, Blue Fox, gjvrieze, nacho, nitrobass24, asgards, axan (I may have missed some, let me know)
Click to expand...

Ockie I like the addition to the sig...LOL
 
protias said:
Double posting FTL!
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lol sorry about that, that was weird.. i came back to the window and it still had my text in the box and the post wasn't up. oh well, i guess i deserve some forty-lashes across the back or something.

...

1TB drives are $112 at my computer store here now.. wowzers they've really come down in price in the last week. I wonder when they are going to be stocking the 1.5's..
 
alcuin said:
Chain mail armor made of hard drive platters.
Click to expand...

LOL!


I picked up a 42U APC NetShelther rack today and rail kits are on order. I'm thinking about building a duplicate copy of my server in the next few months to mirror them.
 
thats one insane case
and pricing is just as mad, you can get two or more fully equiped norco cases with 21 sata2 ports for that price ;D
 
If you want that kind of drive density, there is a 48 bay (I think it's 48, but I know it's over 40) 5U case. It is top loading however. You can also get cases with hot-swap bays that have 2 drives per sled (one behind the front one). Wish I remembered the models so I could link to them...
That Chenbro case is unfortunately seems really impractical (though I wouldn't say no to one if I could get a decent deal on it).
 
Blue Fox said:
If you want that kind of drive density, there is a 48 bay (I think it's 48, but I know it's over 40) 5U case. It is top loading however. You can also get cases with hot-swap bays that have 2 drives per sled (one behind the front one). Wish I remembered the models so I could link to them...
That Chenbro case is unfortunately seems really impractical (though I wouldn't say no to one if I could get a decent deal on it).
Click to expand...

The 5u is nearly 6,000 after shipping and all that jazz... the dual sled one (similar to suns offerings) is in the vicinity of 8,000-10,000 because it's a 4u
 
Ockie said:
The 5u is nearly 6,000 after shipping and all that jazz... the dual sled one (similar to suns offerings) is in the vicinity of 8,000-10,000 because it's a 4u
Click to expand...
Well, its not like the Chenbro one is cheap to begin with. Oh well, I'll just keep dreaming. :(
 
[H]utch;1033098996 said:
What do you have stored on all these drives Ockie?
Click to expand...

nothing... he just builds these monsters cause he can....now thats [H]ard
 
simply impressive. your another one of the reason's that I want to spend a ton of money.

Charles H from Murderbox and Nils at MDPC are the other two reasons lol.
 
Greetings Ockie,

This may have been asked before but have you experienced any issues with the fact that two of your three 8-port supermicro cards are in PCI slots rather than PCI-X?

I guess I need to look up again where PCI maxes out but I assume this config wouldn't work well in a software based striped array lets say (I/O on all 8 disks on a card in PCI mode = choke, I'd suspect)
 
odditory said:
Greetings Ockie,

This may have been asked before but have you experienced any issues with the fact that two of your three 8-port supermicro cards are in PCI slots rather than PCI-X?

I guess I need to look up again where PCI maxes out but I assume this config wouldn't work well in a software based striped array lets say (I/O on all 8 disks on a card in PCI mode = choke, I'd suspect)
Click to expand...

PCI 32bit/66mhz ~266MB/s
PCI-X 64bit/100mhz ~ 800MB/s
PCI-x 64bit/133mhz ~ 1067MB/s
 
odditory said:
Greetings Ockie,

This may have been asked before but have you experienced any issues with the fact that two of your three 8-port supermicro cards are in PCI slots rather than PCI-X?

I guess I need to look up again where PCI maxes out but I assume this config wouldn't work well in a software based striped array lets say (I/O on all 8 disks on a card in PCI mode = choke, I'd suspect)
Click to expand...

Depends on what you are doing, if you are going through a gigabit link (even a good one) you still wont saturate the bus.
 
Ockie said:
Depends on what you are doing, if you are going through a gigabit link (even a good one) you still wont saturate the bus.
Click to expand...

I meant within the scope of what you're doing - which I presume is transfers to and from WHS's drive pool.

It's an interesting idea in any case, since for a while I was hung up on finding a motherboard with at least three PCI-X slots to accomodate three of those 8-port supermicro cards; never occurred to me to just run them on PCI bus. I guess I have some sour experiences with running multiple PCI based SATA I/O cards in the past but those issues were probably more the fault of crap cards (SIIG, Silicone Image, Promise) and/or drivers than the fault of the small shared PCI bandwidth.

I'm seriously trying to "come around" to WHS as I'm testing it in a new build right now, and so far there are still quirks I'm not sure I can live with long-term; for example if a drive fails in the pool there's no indication which drive failed, or the pool continuing to write to a drive that's throwing S.M.A.R.T. errors, etc. In another thread people are making good arguments for unRAID in not suffering some of these same drawbacks so I'm considering testing unRAID (again) as well. On the other hand I really like the growing number of WHS third party plugins available, plus the extra perks of some of the windows-integrated features (i.e. backup-related).
 
odditory said:
I meant within the scope of what you're doing - which I presume is transfers to and from WHS's drive pool.
Click to expand...

With what I'm doing, I'm way ahead of saturating the bus. I haven't experienced any bottle necking via gigabit and thats more than acceptable to me. Now if I went with quad nics or perhaps a 10gbit nic, then I will need to re-approach my concept.

odditory said:
It's an interesting idea in any case, since for a while I was hung up on finding a motherboard with at least three PCI-X slots to accomodate three of those 8-port supermicro cards; never occurred to me to just run them on PCI bus. I guess I have some sour experiences with running multiple PCI based SATA I/O cards in the past but those issues were probably more the fault of crap cards (SIIG, Silicone Image, Promise) and/or drivers than the fault of the small shared PCI bandwidth.
Click to expand...

I've had horrible experiences with cheap controllers on the pci bus, with the supermicros, all of those problems went away.


odditory said:
for example if a drive fails in the pool there's no indication which drive failed
Click to expand...

Download drive manager for WHS, it will show you which drive has failed and it's physical location.

odditory said:
, or the pool continuing to write to a drive that's throwing S.M.A.R.T. errors, etc.
Click to expand...

WHS recognizes when a drive spews out errors and will mark the drive as questionable, but it won't kick it until the thing dies. I wouldn't rely too much on SMART errors, it seems to me that smart reporting is really a crapshoot in determining a failing drive. If you still worry about these notifications, you can install an extension onto your desktop or configure the alerts, then WHS will notify you even when you are not near the server.
 
Thanks for the reply, Ockie. I take SMART with a grain of salt too, but I mentioned it because I've read experiences from some other WHS people that had that as a complaint, which led me to think what seemed like a lack of visibility of hardware failures might be a problem (but as you stated there are plugins for that which is great).

Last question: Which driver are you running for the Supermicro cards? I've seen people go back and forth saying they run unsigned Marvell drivers since the Adaptec drivers were problematic. Those posts were some time ago though, so I wonder, does Supermicro have their own driver for that card now?
 
odditory said:
Thanks for the reply, Ockie. I take SMART with a grain of salt too, but I mentioned it because I've read experiences from some other WHS people that had that as a complaint, which led me to think what seemed like a lack of visibility of hardware failures might be a problem (but as you stated there are plugins for that which is great).

Last question: Which driver are you running for the Supermicro cards? I've seen people go back and forth saying they run unsigned Marvell drivers since the Adaptec drivers were problematic. Those posts were some time ago though, so I wonder, does Supermicro have their own driver for that card now?
Click to expand...

Supermicro has always had thier own driver for the card, at least it recognizes it as supermicros. The drivers are on the disk and they have been shipping as such since the initial release of the old sat1 controllers.

Also, I highly recommend that you don't use the downloaded drivers (Adaptec), they gave me a ton of problems with WHS.
 
Ockie said:
Supermicro has always had thier own driver for the card, at least it recognizes it as supermicros. The drivers are on the disk and they have been shipping as such since the initial release of the old sat1 controllers.

Also, I highly recommend that you don't use the downloaded drivers (Adaptec), they gave me a ton of problems with WHS.
Click to expand...

Hmm.. so I wonder what some people on some forums were crying about Marvell vs Adaptec for that Supermicro 8-port card as far as driver issues. Oh well, good to know about Supermicro having drivers - thanks Ockie.
 
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