new sata/ahci cards with more then 4 ports (and no sata multiplexer)

[IG-88]

there seems to be a new ASMedia SATA chip comparable to the JMB585 (pcie 3.0 2x, 5 port sata)
ASMedia ASM1166, with pcie 3.0 2x support and 6 stata ports, seems to be a alternative to the jmb585 and the one additional port could come in handy when using a 6 x sata onboard solution and wanting to have 12 sata ports and only using one pcie 4x slot, there are also versions as pcie 1x - best option for a pcie 1x slot atm as it can utilize the pcie 3.0 and get up to 1000 MB/s with the one pcie lane (have'nt  seen a jmb585 as pcie 1x card), better then any marvell 88se9215

(sadly no real use for apollolake/geminilake systems as they only support pcie 2.0 but the new elkhart lake  J6413 scheduled for q1/2021 will have pcie 3.0 support and will have two more pcie lanes)

 

pcie 4x cards (only 2 lanes are used), i ordered one of these
https://www.amazon.com/BEYIMEI-Controller-Expansion-Non-Raid-Standard/dp/B08DFK4LZ7
https://www.amazon.com/MZHOU-Controller-Converter-%EF%BC%88Support-Devices%EF%BC%89

 

pcie 1x cards
https://www.amazon.de/ASM1166-GEN3-Erweiterungskarte-langlebige-Play-Erweiterungskarte-PCI-E4X8X16X-Schnittstelle/dp/B08KT9FJZC
https://www.amazon.de/awstroe-GEN3-Erweiterungskarte-Erweiterungskarte-Temperaturwiderstand-PCI-E4X8X16X-Schnittstelle-Default/dp/B08KTCQ6VD
https://www.amazon.de/Erweiterungskarte-ASMedia-Festplatte-Schnittstelle-Durable/dp/B08L6JLZ2V

as i still wanted to use my M.2 slot for sata ports or 10G nic i was looking for mechanical meaningful solutions (the M.2 card i bought with a pcie 4x slot on it was not really usable as it had to much mechanical problems)
there are riser adapter for M.2 to a normal pcie slot (that can be bolted or glued some where and things like cpu cooler or pcie slots will be no hindrance)

 

using a M.2 slot as normal PCIe 3.0 4x Slot with as riser (i ordered the adt-link adapter)
https://www.amazon.com/ADT-LINK-Extension-Express-Extender-R42SF/dp/B08DRDT47K
https://www.amazon.com/NGFF-Extension-Cable-90%C2%B0Right-Angle/dp/B08B3KGNHC
https://www.amazon.com/Timack-NGFF-NVMe-Extension-Cable/dp/B08BXNGKGH

 

same as above but with a 16x pcie slot (imho not needed as the adapters from above have a open back pcie 4x slot so  a 8x/16x card will fit in)
https://www.amazon.com/pcie-NGFF-NVMe-Extension-Cable/dp/B08B3PRJGG
https://www.amazon.com/Extension-Cable-Extender-Cablem-2-Extension/dp/B08B3HRG7L

[flyride]

https://www.ebay.com/itm/6G-pcie-sata-3-ASM1166-chip-pci-express-sata-3-0-expansion-6-Port-X4-X8-X16-fast-/224081366566

[IG-88]

there are lots of offers, also on aliexpress

atm there seems not much to find about that chipset, asmedia has nothing to say about it on its website and there are no real performance tests out there

just a unpacking and description

https://www.skooterblog.com/en/2020/07/30/review-placa-pci-express-3-0-x4-zydas-com-6-portas-sata-6gbps-e-controladora-asmedia-asm1166-aliexpress/

 

more interesting is that asmedia is usually used as cheap pcie bridge chip in 2 x 4 port ahci controllers and if they have pcie 3.0 as standard now i also think there might be a pcie 3.0 version of the existing pcie 2.0, that only has 2 lanes but with pcie 3.0 it will have ~2000MB/s (irl more like ~1800MB/s) and that would be ok'ish for 8-10 conventional hdd's

we already have seen a 2 x jmb585 controller with 10 ports but with the old pcie 2.0 bridge chip (asm1806) its no use when limited to 1000MB/s but with a better pcie bridge and cards using 2 x jmb585 or 2 x asm1166 (both capable of pcie 3.0) we might have usable and affordable cards as alternative to the lsi sas cards

the successor of the asm1806 seems to be the asm2806

https://www.asmedia.com.tw/eng/e_show_products.php?cate_index=170&item=194

so maybe we will see pcie 10-12 port controllers with pcie 3.0 support soon having a asm2806 or maybe asm2812, at least thats something to keep looking for

Edited October 18, 2020 by IG-88

[IG-88]

got a asm1166 based card and its not as flawless as i hoped it would turn out

booting take longer then its normal and there are strange messages about disks ports that should not be there

1-6 is onboard and 7-12 should be the asm1166 but  it counts 32 additional ports instead of 6

the disks are shown ad the expected positions but when adding a 4 port controller (in theory 16 ports over all) these ports get ata39-42

i had 4 disks initially on ports 1,7,8,12 (7,8,12 are boild as a volume), changed disk 8 to the 4 port controller and that disk ended on position 17(?) in the gui and shows "drive41"when hovering the mouse over it, the storage pool and volume work - disk 1 vanished(???)

 

i also added a 8 port ahci controller with two marvell 4port with a pcie bridge instead of the 6 port asm1166 and with that (and the 4 port controller) all disks show up at the expected places and have normal number (like disk15 on position 15 in the gui)

 

looks all very strange and does not invite for using the asm1166  for more then testing, i would not trust it atm, i did not check the logs yet

the jmb585 controller i bought had no problems like this, they worked as expected (at least the pcie cards)

system is a hp deskpro with skylake cpu, so its not that old but i would not rule out soem special poblems with the hpe bios, they tend to do there own things in same places sometimes (like needing mbr loader for csm mode)

 

[    4.853747] ata1: Disk is not present for SATA link down event
[    4.859607] ata2: send port disabled event
[    4.863709] ata2: No present pin info for send port disabled event
[    4.869906] ata3: send port disabled event
[    4.874008] ata3: No present pin info for send port disabled event
[    4.880204] ata4: send port disabled event
[    4.884306] ata4: No present pin info for send port disabled event
[    4.890496] ata5: send port disabled event
[    4.894601] ata5: No present pin info for send port disabled event
[    6.380718] ata9: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[    6.690723] ata10: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[    7.001713] ata11: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[    7.317163] ata13: send port disabled event
[    7.321360] ata13: No present pin info for send port disabled event
[    7.337694] ata14: send port disabled event
[    7.341889] ata14: No present pin info for send port disabled event
[    7.663706] ata15: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[    7.974693] ata16: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[    8.285685] ata17: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[    8.596679] ata18: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[    8.907672] ata19: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[    9.218666] ata20: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[    9.529659] ata21: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[    9.840653] ata22: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[   10.151646] ata23: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[   10.462639] ata24: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[   10.773635] ata25: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[   11.084626] ata26: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[   11.395619] ata27: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[   11.706613] ata28: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[   12.017606] ata29: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[   12.328599] ata30: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[   12.639592] ata31: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[   12.950586] ata32: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[   13.261579] ata33: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[   13.572572] ata34: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[   13.883566] ata35: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[   14.194559] ata36: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[   14.505552] ata37: No present pin info for SATA link down event
[   14.816546] ata38: No present pin info for SATA link down event

 

[yonn]

Please, any PCIe board not too expensive to expand Sata Ports compatible with esxi 6.7 (minimal 4 sata ports)?

 

Thanks in advance

[smilenkovski]

I'm using this one:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32352030105.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.65e94c4d09QBej

without problems.

[IG-88]

10 hours ago, smilenkovski said:

without problems.

beside 4 disks sharing 500MB/s (pcie 2. 0, one lane, marvell 88se9215)

 

15 hours ago, yonn said:

with esxi 6.7 (minimal 4 sata ports)?

doesn't esxi support ahci in general, the controllers i mentioned above are ahci

[flyride]

3 hours ago, IG-88 said:

doesn't esxi support ahci in general, the controllers i mentioned above are ahci

 

Of course.

[mervincm]

jmb585 worked without issue in ESXi 6.7u3? and 7.0u1 in my limited testing

[smilenkovski]

"beside 4 disks sharing 500MB/s (pcie 2. 0, one lane, marvell 88se9215)"

 

Enough to  saturate 1GB LAN.

[IG-88]

10 hours ago, smilenkovski said:

Enough to  saturate 1GB LAN.

the 500B/s will also limit the rebuild speed when a disk failed (will be interesting for 6TB disks and bigger)

i would not go with a pcie 2.0 card anymore when i can get a pcie 3.0 capable card

 

[IG-88]

found a different hardware of a asm1166 card, Silverstone ECS06

https://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=973&area=en

(not as cheap as the others, ~55€)

 

[Vaifranz]

Hi, I am testing the JMB585 card in a ds3617 system but I am having several problems and I don't understand why.
Fresh installation, DSM 6.2.3 update 3, during the installation phase everything is ok, during the RAID realization phase (both SHR and RAID5 or 6) I find several disconnections of HDD. Tried it on two motherboards, AsRock Z97 extreme9 and AsRock C226WS +, but the problems are the same, HDD WD RED. Any advice I can follow, thanks.

[Orphée]

I probably missread but with not use LSI 9211-8i IT SAS card ?

With 1.03b ds3615xs loader it works plug & play in passthrough

[Vaifranz]

Thanks for the reply, I also have the 9211-8i card and I confirm that it works great with both 3615 and 3617, unfortunately it does not have the correspondence of the physical slots with those of the XPEnology system, it always puts them in order one after the other  even if they are in different slots.  I can very well keep track of the number of HDDs.  > However I was interested in making a "more performing" system, the JB585 card travels with PCIe 3.0 while LSI 9211-8-i with PCIe 2.0, considering that I have 6Tb drives, when you build a RAID or rebuild time is  long ... and I also wanted to use this card to "tidy up" the numbering of the discs.

[IG-88]

1 hour ago, Vaifranz said:

the JB585 card travels with PCIe 3.0 while LSI 9211-8-i with PCIe 2.0, considering that I have 6Tb drives, when you build a RAID or rebuild time is  long

the lsi sas controller can compensate for the pcie 2.0 by using up to 8 pcie lanes, the jmb585 and asm1166 only use 2 pcie lanes, so on numbers the lsi sas can be twice as fast as the jmb585 on the pcie bus

 

12 hours ago, Vaifranz said:

I find several disconnections of HDD. Tried it on two motherboards, AsRock Z97 extreme9 and AsRock C226WS +, but the problems are the same, HDD WD RED.

atm the jmb585 is just in the backup systems and thats offline most of the time

i will try to replace it there and see if i can have the jmb585 in my test hardware

[Vaifranz]

6 hours ago, IG-88 said:

atm the jmb585 is just in the backup systems and thats offline most of the time

i will try to replace it there and see if i can have the jmb585 in my test hardware

Thanks for your interest, I will wait for the results of your tests.  I don't believe you are using a particular extra.lzma file.

[IG-88]

1 hour ago, Vaifranz said:

 I don't believe you are using a particular extra.lzma file.

the ahci is part of synologys kernel, so its not important what extra.lzma you are using

what can make a difference is if its 918+ or 3615/17 because of 4.4.59+ vs 3.10.105 kernel

 

had a pcie 1x jmb582 card (same as jmb585 but just 2 ports) and tryied with two 500GB hitachi disks as raid1 and filled the whole disk, nothing shown so far when opening disk health

i will try with the jmb585 next and do a raid migration from 1 to 5 with a 3rd disk, should result in plenty of disk activity (atm testing with 918+)

i have a bunch of 500GB disks around among them seagate and wd and there are also some smaller ssd from crucial and samsung i can test with

Edited February 7, 2021 by IG-88

[IG-88]

22 hours ago, Vaifranz said:

AsRock Z97 extreme9 and AsRock C226WS +, but the problems are the same, HDD WD RED.

if its kernel related you would be able to use 918+, both boards are for 4th/5th gen intel cpu's

so if one of the systems is still without data you could try to create a shr, raid5/6 with 1.04b 918+ DSM 6.2.3

 

did the reconnects happen to all disks on the jmb585?

 

on my other system with 3617 and jmb585 there are 0 reconnects with 4TB seagate disks

so far no reconnects with hitachi disks and jmb585/582 and 918+

next run tomorrow will be 3617 with seagate, wd and hitachi hdd's

 

 

[Vaifranz]

5 hours ago, IG-88 said:

did the reconnects happen to all disks on the jmb585?

The reconnections did not occur on all the disks but only on one or two. Testing, replacing disks that were disconnecting, there were others that had the same problem. The problem occurred with both 918+ and 3615/17. I try again because I have no feedback to post. maybe tonight. Basically it disconnected the disk, or the disks, and could not create the raid, generally I tried on SHR having disks of different sizes, I think that with SHR it works more.

[IG-88]

1st run 918+ 6.2.3, mix of different 2.5"/3.5" disks (5+2 JMB585/582), created a RAID6

WDC WD5000AAKX
Seagate GB0750EAFJK
Seagate ST500DM002
HGST HTS725050A7E630
WDC WD3200BEVT
HGST HDS5C4040ALE630
Samsung ST500LM0

 

not a single reconnect

i will try with 3617 next

 

 

 

[IG-88]

3 hours ago, IG-88 said:

not a single reconnect

i will try with 3617 next

 

same result with 3617, no problems, no reconnects

maybe its a problem with that controller, vendor or board design

On 2/7/2021 at 2:02 AM, Vaifranz said:

testing the JMB585 card

can you provide a picture and a source where you bought it?

 

mine looks like this

 

i also had a m.2 card with a jmb585 and that one never was stable, but it has more problems then reconnects

i do have a 2nd card in another system i might swap for the one i use for testing, same board design bought later from a different brand

 

i've seen at least two other board designs

 

Edited February 8, 2021 by IG-88

[Vaifranz]

Thank you for taking the time to address this issue, which apparently is mine alone.  The card I use is like the first photo you posted, unfortunately today I did not have the opportunity to do some tests to post the messages that result from dmesg, I hope tomorrow.  Meanwhile, I am grateful to you.

[Vaifranz]

[ 3361.874311] ata14: device unplugged sstatus 0x0
[ 3361.874339] ata14.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x1c0000 SErr 0x9b0000 action 0xe frozen
[ 3361.882474] ata14.00: irq_stat 0x00400000, PHY RDY changed
[ 3361.887987] ata14: SError: { PHYRdyChg PHYInt 10B8B Dispar LinkSeq }
[ 3361.894350] ata14.00: failed command: WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
[ 3361.899726] ata14.00: cmd 61/80:90:e0:fa:01/00:00:08:00:00/40 tag 18 ncq 65536 out
                        res 40/00:98:e0:fd:01/00:00:08:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[ 3361.915280] ata14.00: status: { DRDY }
[ 3361.919039] ata14.00: failed command: WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
[ 3361.924377] ata14.00: cmd 61/80:98:e0:fd:01/00:00:08:00:00/40 tag 19 ncq 65536 out
                        res 40/00:98:e0:fd:01/00:00:08:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[ 3361.939927] ata14.00: status: { DRDY }
[ 3361.943669] ata14.00: failed command: WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
[ 3361.948985] ata14.00: cmd 61/80:a0:e0:00:02/00:00:08:00:00/40 tag 20 ncq 65536 out
                        res 40/00:98:e0:fd:01/00:00:08:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[ 3361.964596] ata14.00: status: { DRDY }
[ 3361.968605] ata14: hard resetting link
[ 3365.801343] ata14: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[ 3365.902355] ata14.00: configured for UDMA/133
[ 3365.902362] ata14.00: Write Cache is enabled
[ 3365.906628] ata14: EH complete

This is the message when I launch dmesg and when a disk disconnects

[Vaifranz]

However it only happened once, the other times it happened continuously and repeatedly, the difference is that now I am not using the 24 bay case, but another case where the HDDs are connected individually and not via a backplane as in the 24 bay. Maybe my problem is the backplane.