On 7/28/2012 6:41 PM, Stirling Westrup wrote: > Okay, it looks like its a known hardware chipset problem, and was > first reported 6-months ago. > > It affects all PCI cards in Asus Sandy-Bridge Motherboards. No known > fix as of yet. > > https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/1/30/216 At least our discussion got you looking in multiple directions, one of which led you to this information. Given the problem is related to legacy PCI INTx sharing/routing, whether on the PCI or PCIe bus, I'd recommend you step up to a high quality PCIe x8 SAS/SATA HBA, such as the LSI 9211-8i PCIe x8, which supports MSI-X and should instantly solve your problem. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118112 You'll need two breakout cables: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816116098 This solution will set you back almost $300 USD. I just did some research on the Syba 4 port SiI 3124 PCIe x1 card. The SiI 3124 is a native PCI/X chip, thus the board uses a PCI-X to PCIe bridge chip which hides under the large heatsink. Thus this card will not work, as it uses legacy PCI interrupts: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124027 I also looked at the Syba and Adaptec Marvell PCIe x1 SATAII 4 port cards. While the Marvell chip is native PCIe I'm unable to confirm it supports MSI/X. And given these cards run $80-90, that's $160-180 for two of them. The LSI above is pretty much guaranteed to work for ~$100 more. What's your reputation with your client worth? Speaking of which, don't even look at the $110 8 port Supermicro SAS/SATA controller. It uses the Marvell SAS chip. Although the chip itself is fine and works with Windows, the Linux driver *will* eat your data, all the way up to kernel 3.4. I've personally rectified this situation for a half dozen users who bought this SM SAS board on price alone. I converted them all to LSI HBAs and no problems since. The solution cost them 2-3x as much but they're all happy because it simply works reliably, and fast. Or you can start swapping $150+ motherboards until you find one that works with those $20 Syba 3114 cards. But then you need to ask yourself, how much is your time worth. You could easily burn 20 or more hours going that route. Get the LSI and be done with this. -- Stan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
