Ran out of SATA ports on motherboard - question...


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I just want all drives to be on a SATA card so I was thinking of buying a 8 port SATA card.  I currently have one hard drive on a SATA card that I really didn't want to use but I just realized I ran out of SATA ports.  Since the add, the performance of my drive pool (Stablebit Drive Pool) has been affected dramatically - would that make sense?  Like could the card not be fast enough to effect the other drives in the pool 

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9 minutes ago, Xilo said:

Sounds like maybe you should get a better motherboard or upgrade your drives instead.

Not what he asked.

OP - Yes the card will likely be affecting it due to PCi limitations.

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1 hour ago, Xilo said:

Sounds like maybe you should get a better motherboard or upgrade your drives instead.

It's a mini itx and the drives are all wd reds.  up until now it was fine.  I went from 6 to 7 drives but 1 of them had to go on the card.  

 

54 minutes ago, Nashy said:

Not what he asked.

OP - Yes the card will likely be affecting it due to PCi limitations.

Ok thank you.  But if all the same card, it should get around that limitation?  Or will there be slowdown on the card as well vs onboard?

 

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1 hour ago, AndyD said:

I just want all drives to be on a SATA card so I was thinking of buying a 8 port SATA card.  I currently have one hard drive on a SATA card that I really didn't want to use but I just realized I ran out of SATA ports.  Since the add, the performance of my drive pool (Stablebit Drive Pool) has been affected dramatically - would that make sense?  Like could the card not be fast enough to effect the other drives in the pool 

It's unclear, are you using all drives on a single SATA card? Or all drives on the onboard SATA and one drive on a SATA card? Either way, you could be experiencing a bottleneck accessing the drive(s) on the SATA card.

 

What kind of PCI slot is this card installed in? PCIe? x1, x4, etc?

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5 minutes ago, Bryan R. said:

What kind of PCI slot is this card installed in? PCIe? x1, x4, etc?

To add to his question, which company makes the card?

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It's a...

 

SYBA SY-PEX40039 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) PCI-e 2.0 x1 Card

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124045

 

Which is what the slot is on the motherboard

 

Currently I have 6 drives via the motherboard.  1 on the PCI card.   I need to add more drives without going through the cost of getting a new motherboard and case.

 

I see I can get something like this (image below)...

 

https://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-br10i-lsi-sas3082e-r-pciexpress-sas-raid-controller/

 

Which is not what I wanted to do (i.e. spend money) but may not have a choice.  Would a card like that still have bottlenecks if I have the drives all on it?

 

 

card.PNG

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Don't know the other brand but symbology as a nas you mean? I'm not looking to spend any more than $100 and that's hard as it is. I didn't think I would run into this issue but I need the space and my pool is not accessible at the moment because of this. Hoping by morning Stablebit is done and I can remove the drive

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5 minutes ago, AndyD said:

Don't know the other brand but symbology as a nas you mean? I'm not looking to spend any more than $100 and that's hard as it is. I didn't think I would run into this issue but I need the space and my pool is not accessible at the moment because of this. Hoping by morning Stablebit is done and I can remove the drive

Sent from my SM-T700 using Tapatalk
 

 

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I suspect that your motherboard's PCIe speed limitation is the issue when attached a drive to the card. That said, you might want to consider a similar chipset micro-ATX motherboard with eight onboard SATA III controllers and a much faster PCIe v3.0 16x slot(s).

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5 hours ago, adrynalyne said:

 

 

Hahah damn auto correct

 

 

5 hours ago, seeprime said:

I suspect that your motherboard's PCIe speed limitation is the issue when attached a drive to the card. That said, you might want to consider a similar chipset micro-ATX motherboard with eight onboard SATA III controllers and a much faster PCIe v3.0 16x slot(s).

 

I have an Asus H87M-E - it has a PCIe v3 16x slot.  I'll probably buy a card for that.  8 sata ports for a micro atx board do not seem to be a common thing.  The card is probably the better option anyway if the performance is fine on a PCIe 16x slot.   That way I'm free to actually add 8 drives for the pool and leave the other ports open for everything else.

 

5 hours ago, The Evil Overlord said:

Question, how much total capacity are you running? (Might need to look at your raid settings as well?)

No RAID.  I'm using Stablebit's Drive Pool to create a pool of drives that sort of works like RAID 1.   I have about 12tbs across 6 drives - that's after removing the problem drive.  I woke up this morning to find the server was down.  Fed up with it so I just disconnected the drive and now working towards removing it from the pool as if the drive died

 

Edited by AndyD
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8 minutes ago, AndyD said:

No RAID.  I'm using Stablebit's Drive Pool to create a pool of drives that sort of works like RAID 1.   I have about 12tbs across 6 drives - that's after removing the problem drive.  I woke up this morning to find the server was down.  Fed up with it so I just disconnected the drive and now working towards removing it from the pool as if the drive died

 

Might want to look at getting a hp p410 for 50 bucks and using that to create a raid 6 array.

 

It just works.

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No RAID.  I'm using Stablebit's Drive Pool to create a pool of drives that sort of works like RAID 1.   I have about 12tbs across 6 drives - that's after removing the problem drive.  I woke up this morning to find the server was down.  Fed up with it so I just disconnected the drive and now working towards removing it from the pool as if the drive died
 

I use StableBit, hit up Christopher on their forums. He's absolutely awesome. He's helped me a lot. But an hp p410 would work. I have 6x 3tb drives in my pool. I have it setup in a raid 0 configuration with back ups to ACD.

Tapatalk won't load the full post for some reason.

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5 minutes ago, BinaryData said:

hit up Christopher on their forums

hehe - told you their support was top notch..

 

5 minutes ago, BinaryData said:

I have 6x 3tb drives in my pool. I have it setup in a raid 0 configuration with back ups to ACD

You have what?  you have six 3tb drives in a raid zero and then that is in your stablebit pool?  Sorry but that just seems moronic to me!!  That is not the point of the pool software..  So then you have other drives in the pool along with that raid zero array disk?

 

Or do you have 6 disks connected to your raid card, and then those six different disks are in your pool?  Post up a screenshot of your pool config - or PM it to me, since that is a bit off topic to the OP question.

 

As to the OP question - so do a speed test to each of your disks..  How do you have these disks connected to your pool?  All of them are in the same pool?  Is the pool busy moving data around after you added a new disk?  How do you have your pool setup for balance, etc.

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I use StableBit, hit up Christopher on their forums. He's absolutely awesome. He's helped me a lot. But an hp p410 would work. I have 6x 3tb drives in my pool. I have it setup in a raid 0 configuration with back ups to ACD.

Tapatalk won't load the full post for some reason.

Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk



Tapatalk just pushed out another update. I think the one they pushed out last night had some bugs so try updating.

As for Christopher, yep he's awesome. I've been going back and forth with him yesterday and he suspected it could be the SATA card. I removed the drive from the system hoping I can just treat it as a dead drive. I also switched back to an image of my server before I tried upgrading to 2016. The drive pool seems to be OK but I'm afraid to open the app / make any changes to it till I hear back from Christopher



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1 hour ago, BudMan said:
.

 

As to the OP question - so do a speed test to each of your disks..  How do you have these disks connected to your pool?  All of them are in the same pool?  Is the pool busy moving data around after you added a new disk?  How do you have your pool setup for balance, etc.

All the drives are in the same pool. I'm not certain of the count anymore but it's at least 5 drives connected to the motherboard and then a drive I recently connected to some syba SATA card I had installed already for a DVR recordings hard drive

 

So what keeps happening is that the app will stay stuck on measuring status. I can't really tell what it is doing during that process as I see no progress or activity besides the bar moving. It all started when I tried upgrading to 2016 but I had added the drive to the pool before that and I didn't notice any issues then. It's only after installing 2016 and reinstalling drive pool that these issues started to crop up. Guessing because the app is looking to rebalance everthing. Not sure. Christopher mentioned it should be quick but that hasn't been the case

 

I've since recovered an image I made before setting up 2016. I stepped out for some errands so not sure where it's at now but it seemed like it was ok. The pool was there and folders files seem to be intact. I did disconnect the new drive but I have not removed it via the app. I'm hesitant to open it again to only end up running into the same issue

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Edited by AndyD
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