On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 5:24 AM, Stan Hoeppner <stan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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. > The above sounds like excellent advice, and you have saved me several hours of perusing catalogs trying to figure out what to buy to replace the two SiI cards. I greatly appreciate the help, and I have sent off an order to NewEgg for the LSI board and cables. -- Stirling Westrup Programmer, Entrepreneur. https://www.linkedin.com/e/fpf/77228 http://www.linkedin.com/in/swestrup http://technaut.livejournal.com http://sourceforge.net/users/stirlingwestrup -- 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
