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Need Help With IOCREST SI-PEX40137, 8 Port SAS/SATA III PCI-e x4 Controller Card

TheLoneGunman
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Hi, I recently bought an IOCREST SI-PEX40137, 8 Port SAS/SATA III PCI-e x4 Controller Card.  It has dual Marvell 9215 Chips supporting FreeNAS and ZFS RAID.  It is a PCI-E 2.0 card, but it should still give me 6.0 gbps performance.

 

I am using it on an Asus Z370-A motherboard. I have it plugged into an x8 slot.

 

It works.  I have speed tested it with a single 8TB SATA 3 hard drive.  I am getting full speed for this hard drive.

 

However, I noticed in the BIOS it is only showing as an x1 device, supporting up to 5.0 GBPS.

 

Does anyone know why this is only showing as an x1 device?

 

Also, as I am only using spinning hard drives with this card, does it even matter if it is only running at x1 speed?  It does not seem to be an issue with one drive hooked up, but what if I had 4 or 8 drives hooked up?  Would the x1 vs x4 speed matter?

Thanks.

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25 minutes ago, TheLoneGunman said:

However, I noticed in the BIOS it is only showing as an x1 device, supporting up to 5.0 GBPS.

My guess is that the BIOS is showing the Marvell 88SE9215 lane width (which is x1) behind the PCIe switch.

 

26 minutes ago, TheLoneGunman said:

It has dual Marvell 9215 Chips supporting FreeNAS and ZFS RAID

I can't say that card for certain will have issues, but I've had two different Marvell-based SATA cards in my FreeNAS server over the years, and both of them caused really weird issues. I almost lost an entire array because the 88SE9230-based card wouldn't pass SMART data correctly (FreeNAS would hang whenever it wanted to do a health check), and the 88SE9235-based card would wait 30 seconds between write transactions (so it would average single-digit-MBps speeds). Honestly consider returning that card and getting an LSI SAS card instead (would use the same breakout cables). And they're cheaper, too. I have the same card, and can walk you through setting it up with FreeNAS.

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Spoiler 
                           ┌─────────────── Office/Rack ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
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(500Mbps↑/500Mbps↓)                             UniFi CloudKey Gen2 (PoE) ─┴─ Veda (IPMI)           ╠═ Veda-NAS (HW Passthrough NIC)
╔═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╩═ Narrative (Asus USB 2.5G NIC)
║ ┌────── Closet ──────┐   ┌─────────────── Bedroom ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
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Thanks. I went and bought an LSI 9217-8i for $35 on eBay. I will be returning the IOCrest controller.

 

I have installed the LSI controller and it works. However, it is in IR mode, which has it taking about 3 minutes to boot.

 

Now I just have to figure out how to flash the BIOS to IT mode and update the firmware.  It does not seem very straightforward....


If you know how to do this, please let me know. Thanks.

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