SuperMicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8

treadstone

Gawd
Joined
Jan 25, 2010
Messages
567
AOC-SAS2LP-MV8.gif


Has anyone tried this card yet?

http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SAS2LP-MV8.cfm

Key Features
• 8-channel SAS/SATA adapter with 600MB/s per channel
• PCI-E x8 interface
• JBOD mode only. No RAID support
• Dimension: 6.6" (length) x 2.7" (width)

I've seen the drivers for this card on the SM ftp site for quite some time but haven't seen the actual card listed on their website until recently...
 
Are you sure it was the AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 and not the AOC-SASLP-MV8 ?

They look somewhat similar but this is the new 6Gbps card hence the 2 in the model number!


This is the new AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 card:

AOC-SAS2LP-MV8.gif


This is the older AOC-SASLP-MV8 card:

AOC-SASLP-MV8.gif
 
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I was thinking of reviewing one of these. I thought (may very well be wrong here) that MV meant Marvell controller.
 
I'm pretty sure that's what the MV stands for...

SAS (Serial Attached Small Computer System Interface)
2 (for the new faster SAS interface version)
LP (I assume stands for Low Profile)
MV (uses a Marvell controller)
8 (Total of 8 SAS ports)

The AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 is based on the Marvell 9480 controller. The older AOC-SASLP-MV8 is based on the Marvell 6480 controller, which is the predecessor to the 9480.
 
The older card has a mixed history. Under Windows family OS people (including me) have reported great success and seem satisfied with its performance. Under Linux, not so good. The biggest difference seems to be the qualify of the drivers. There is also a complete lack for support for Solaris and BSD derived systems which has diminished interest in the card (which is really too bad, because this could be an excellent card for ZFS-based systems).

Looking around a bit, it seems that the driver model for the 6480 and 9480 are identical and both cards are supported (at least on Linux) by exactly the same driver. On the Linux forums there is discussion of support for the 9480 simply by updating the driver to recognize the card's ID string. This is not good news, since the #1 fault with the older SASLP-MV8 was buggy/missing drivers.

If SM and/or Marvell would release working drivers for Linux and perhaps even drivers for Solaris or BSD based systems this could be a card worth a look. Without them, unless you are running on Windows, pass.
 
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I realize this is quite an old thread, but had some questions regarding this (or any HBA only card) that I was unable to answer on other forums.

I have an Ubuntu Server which I would like to expand the disk capacity. As far as I can tell for this card, drivers and firmware aren't a major issue. I have seen they do support 3TB drives, which is what I will be connecting. Obviously hardware RAID would be the way to go, but for the cost and somewhat limited drive support (for the most part), I would like to stick with simple mdadm.

My question:

If I connected hard drives to this card, would they show in the OS as each individual drive so as to support software RAID or would this card simply JBOD them all together?
 
I can't answer your question in regards to Ubuntu, however under the windows driver, each connected drive appears as an individual drive. I would assume that the Ubuntu driver would do the same.
 
As an update to this thread, I can report that current windows SAS2 driver (4.0.0.2010) for the AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 (with firmware 4.0.0.1800) does NOT support putting each individual drive to sleep (via the advanced power options in windows power management).

The predecessor (AOC-SASLP-MV8) does allow to put the drives to sleep.

I made SM aware of this and hope that they will have an updated driver available sometime in the near future that will allow to put drives to sleep...
 
Has anyone have success with this card?? I have 3 of them in a Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O running W2K8 and Flexraid. When doing large file transfers to any of the cards, all HD's will drop out and a reboot is required. I tried using Samsung 2TB drives and WD 2TB 64mb cache drives and all do the same thing. Also, I'm using the current drivers from SM website.

Any suggestions??? This is driving me nuts!
 
The SAS2LP has a few problems, I ended up getting the SASLP due to these. On a plus side, the SASLP is able to let hard drives spindown while the SAS2LP cannot, and I know this since I emailed Supermicro about this. I guess the SAS2LP is still a work in progress...
 
Wow... that sucks. I'm going to try and call Supermicro tomorrow and see if they have any suggestions. If not, I'm going to probably get a IBM M1015...
 
Called Supermicro today -- they say its my hard drives causing the issue; I think its just an excuse. I am using Samsung F4 HD204UI and/or WD EARS 2TB -- either/all work with the onboard controller and in other computers with no problems.

Anyhow -- anyone have any suggestions? I am using a Supermicro X9SCM-F-O board with 3x AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 with the latest firmware/drivers. The issue I'm having is that the card will drop all connected drives when large data transfers occur. I even put a 120mm high speed fan over the cards thinking it was a heat related issue.
 
I'm also running FlexRAID (snapshot + pool) with an AOC-SASLP, 3x 2TB WD EARS/EARX (DRU) and 1x 2TB Hitachi 7K2000 (PPU) for roughly 6TB of usable data. Have you always had this problem or is this a new build? How are you copying data over (e.g., external hard drive, network, etc...)? How many drives are you running and how are they connected? Any on the motherboard, all from the HBA's, or both? Are you sure this is not a FlexRAID problem? When you say the hard drives "drop," do you mean Windows shows the hard drive disappearing, and/or the FlexRAID storage pool has stopped? When was the last time you validated your pool? Maybe it's data/pool corruption and you need to resync.

For hardware, I couldn't get the M1015 (flashed to IT mode) to let the drives spindown no matter what I tried and set. Not sure if that matters to you but it did for me which is why I passed on the newer SAS2LP.
 
This is a brand new build with freshly installed W2K8 and Flexraid. The drives are clean of data and data is being transferred over a 1gb network connection. The drives are also connected with a 8087 (or whatever) forward cable, minisas to 4x sata. I've tried different cables as well. When large amounts of data are being copied over the network to the Flexraid pool, the transfer will stop/freeze after about 2-10minutes of copying. The drives will then drop out of the device manager in Windows -- Flexraid will list the drives as missing once the disk config is refreshed. I should also note I now have the parity drives hooked to the motherboard sata and that is never affected by the issue. At first, I did have the parity drive connected to the HBA and the issue was still occurring.

I haven't tried:

  • Copying local data to the drives, eliminating the network all together.
  • Hooking all drives to the motherboard and transferring data to see if the issue is Flexraid/drives/network.
 
Well, a few things:
- Go to the FlexRAID forums and post your logs. This is probably the first thing I would do.
- How much data are you copying? How do you have data priority set in FlexRAID? Is the hangup before or after completely filling one HDD worth of data (e.g., less than 2 TB if your DRU is 2TB)?
- Try copying files to a non-FlexRAID hard drive through the network and see if there are any hangups there. I doubt this problem is caused from copying over the network though.
- Create different pools (note: you can only have 1 pool at a time unless that restriction was recently lifted so you'll have to create, initialize, delete) based on what you have hooked up to the motherboard (e.g., one pool for MB connections, one pool for first HBA, one pool for second HBA, one pool for third HBA), and copy over 500GB to 1TB of data assuming that you are having problems copying 50GB to 100GB of data right now; it should take you roughly an hour per TB to initialize. See if one of them hangs up.
 
Right now, I only have 5 hard drives hooked up until I get this working and the rest of my drives (18 or so) will be migrated over along with my data. Drives are clean and hangup occurs when I try to copy a data that is large (Blu-Ray rips/DVD rips, trying either 2-4gb at a time or 10gb+). I'm not sure how the data priority is set in Flexraid, but my config is Pool+Snapshot under cruise control with default settings. The total is 5.6ish TB free under pool (3x 2tb drives) and 1x 2tb drive as parity. All drives have been formatted under Windows prior to being added to the pool. These same drives were also used in my homemade NAS for LAN parties using a Dell PERC RAID card. I should mention that I just pulled the drives from that computer, formatted in Windows 2K8 on the new system then added to the pool. Do you think the issue could be a boot record for the Dell card on the drives somewhere? Maybe I have to remove them from that Dell raid array before pulling?

The drives hooked up are:
- 1x 300gb WD Raptor (OS and programs only)
- 2x Samsung HD204UI 2TB drives (with firmware updated)
- 2x WD EARS Green 2TB drives

Dropouts happened with these configurations:
- Both WD and Sam hooked to HBA
- Just WD hooked to HBA
- Just Sams hooked to HBA
- One Sam hooked to mobo and rest to HBA

All of these were tried with either 1 card installed, 2 cards installed or 3 cards installed with INT13 disabled/enabled and OPROM disabled/enabled. I've also tried different cables and a 120mm fan blowing on the cards to eliminate heat related issues.
 
Just to make sure, does it hang up if you are copying from the network and directly to the WD OS drive? Have you tried excluding all the HBA's, connecting them all to the motherboard, initializing FlexRAID and than copying?
 
I have not tried copying directly to the WD o/s drive over the network -- I will most certainly try that. I will also try hooking the drives directly to the mobo and trying to copy over the network to them. I still have a feeling that the cards are causing the issues, mainly because of the issues with the first gen of SASLP-MV8 cards having similar issues. I will report back in the next few days with my test results. Also, just to clarify -- the system isn't hanging, the drives connected to the HBA are dropping out of Windows -- no actual o/s freezing or crashes; the drives will reappear upon reboot.
 
Update:

-Turned off Flexraid and deleted the Flexraid array. Then, tried to copy from the network to the drives when connected to the HBA... had dropouts after 5 minutes.

- Tried hooking up the hard drives to the motherboard satas with nothing on the HBA and I'm getting disgustingly slow transfer speeds from the network; about 2mb a second.. Going to update the mobo drivers and see if that helps.
 
I just read on another forum that sometimes the controller card will assign all drives connected to it the same SAS address for the drives connected; I'm going to see if mine does the same thing. If so, the way to fix it is to reflash the bios; will report back soon.

Also, I updated my NIC drivers and the mobo connected drives transfer files much better now; I'm going to reconnect the drives to the HBA with the new NIC drivers and see if that fixes the dropouts.
 
I have two of the older cards and they are junk. They can't handle large amounts of data at one time and drop HDs. I am saving up to replace them with a 24 or 32 port Intel card.
 
I have two of the older cards and they are junk. They can't handle large amounts of data at one time and drop HDs. I am saving up to replace them with a 24 or 32 port Intel card.

I've heard of these issues with the older cards...very disconcerting. Anyhow, what were you thinking of getting? I see a Intel expander (RES2SV240) -- what are you considering using as a controller?
 
I'd try putting the HBA into another computer, install FlexRAID (trail license so don't bother re-registering), seeing if there are still problems. It may be the motherboard.
 
The problem is I don't have another mobo to test with. I honestly doubt its the mobo given the track record I've seen of the SASLP series cards. Granted this is the newer version, but I just ordered a M1015 card to see how that works with the LSI IT flash mod.
 
I've heard of these issues with the older cards...very disconcerting. Anyhow, what were you thinking of getting? I see a Intel expander (RES2SV240) -- what are you considering using as a controller?

I will probably go with Intel® RAID Expander RES2CV360 and not use a controller. I am running 21 HDs on my setup right now and am running out of space. 38TB in all
 
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