PCIe lanes, usb 3 controller cards, IRQ - troubleshooting
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@Propagandalf said in PCIe lanes, usb 3 controller cards - troubleshooting:
@rds said in PCIe lanes, usb 3 controller cards - troubleshooting:
@Propagandalf said in PCIe lanes, usb 3 controller cards - troubleshooting:
@Focus said in PCIe lanes, usb 3 controller cards - troubleshooting:
With the Sonnet Allegro Pro, you only need but the one card. You can run easily 25-30 Hard drives off of it.
I have 100 HDDs.
Assuming Windows, are you mounting some of them as a sub folder inside other drives to stay within the A-Z drive letter limitation? Would an IRQ limit only be applicable to the A-Z? Not an expert, but I know just enough to ask questions like this :)
While testing this I do not have any drives connected at all, so that is not part of my problem (yet). =)
I'm flashing BIOS to latest right now, to see if that helps. Thought I had newest, but apparently not.
After that, start adding the cards in one by one and see at what point the computer no longer wants to POST
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@Focus I tried that already before flashing, and it stops posting after installing the third card. I will try again after flashing bios.
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@Propagandalf From memory the X99 boards have 28 PCIe lanes. With the onboard LAN/USB 3.0 taking a few, the Video card another 16, you're probably running out of lanes. Try moving the video card to a 16x physical but 8x/4x electrical slot and see if you can get additional cards up.
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I also just checked one of my miners, I am running 16-20 drives per controller port.
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@haitch CPU has PCIe 3.0 Lanes: 40x ... MB supports that.
MB has seven PCIe 3 -> x16/x8/x8/x8/x8/x8/x8 (some are shared) so i do not see any reason why 5 PCIe 2 x4 should not work ...
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@luxe Shows how good my memory is ..... ;-)
However according to this wikipedia article
The chipset supports 8 PCIe 2.0 lanes. I'd assumed the the PCIe 3.0 lanes could support PCIe 2.0 devices, but maybe this is an incorrect assumption?
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@haitch said in PCIe lanes, usb 3 controller cards - troubleshooting:
@luxe Shows how good my memory is ..... ;-)
However according to this wikipedia article
The chipset supports 8 PCIe 2.0 lanes. I'd assumed the the PCIe 3.0 lanes could support PCIe 2.0 devices, but maybe this is an incorrect assumption?
PCI-e specification will allow the port to work and adjust accordingly, so you can use a pci-e 3.0 card in a 2.0 slot and vice versa
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I have tried removing the CMOS battery for 10 minutes and then replacing it, but it did not help. I also tried changing bios settings for PCIe speed from 'auto' to 'Gen1' and 'Gen2', but no luck there either. I have sent a support e-mail to Sonnet to ask if this is normal behavious when using more than two of their controller cards in one system, but I can't expect an answer from them before earliest on Tuesday.
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@Propagandalf you can run 100 drives off 2 controllers, plus that motherboard has it's own, so 3 controllers
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@Focus Definitely, but if my calculations are right I should be able to reduce reads times even more by having an increased number of controllers. With two cards working it gives me 8 controllers, plus the system has 2 controllers from before. To get optimal readings I should have 2-3 HDDs connected to each controller, I believe.
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@Propagandalf negligeable I would think. I read 213TB in under a minute with one card, and I believe luxe is at 30 seconds with that card
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@Focus Sounds good, but I am trying to build a lightning fast miner =)
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@Focus I have a comparable controller-card like that sonnet one, and on every USB3 port i have a external case with 4 drives ... it also depends on drive size ... with 2TB drives it can be some more.
From my point of view @Propagandalf did everything right, to build a USB based storage solution.
But sure you are right it is quite overpowerd, maybe he has some sweet 10TB drives with 220MB/s :-)@Propagandalf you have gpu in first PCIe next to CPU right? Thats the x16 one.
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@luxe
I have a midi tower with extra fans installed,so no space in PCIe slot 1 for GPU(edit: trying to put GPU here now). So, I have it in PCIe slot 7 instead, and have tried the controller cards in PCIe slot 1-5 (6 is blocked by GPU). Each slot is x16 on this mobo, according to the manual.
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@Propagandalf
7 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 (single x16 or dual x16/x16 or triple x16/x16/x16 or quad x16/x16/x16/x16 or seven x16/x8/x8/x8/x8/x8/x8)
You have to put GPU in slot 1, to get full speed! (if remaining 5 are used)

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@Propagandalf it could be you are drawing too much power from the PSU when the third card is installed. Try the 3 cards with a more powerful PSU to see if that works.
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I now have GPU in slot 1, and two controller cards in slot 6 and 7. That works, but again when I plug another controller card into slot 5, it won't boot. This might be of interest: The Dr debug error code I get is "96", which apparently means "PCI bus assign resources". The signs still point to some kind of non-optimal resource assignment for the PCIe slots. Maybe there are other ways I can tweak the settings?
My PSU is 650W, so I don't think that I'm drawing too much power with these cards, unfortunately I don't have a more powerful PSU to test it with.
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@Propagandalf if the motherboard has a on board gpu, remove the extra GPU to draw less power or else use a less power hungry GPU card if you have one available. If either works then you know for sure its a power issue.
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@iKnow0 I don't have either of those alternatives, unfortunately.
Edit: I think the rx470 uses about 130W during heavy load, which isn't all that bad.
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@Propagandalf borrow a more powerful psu or old GPU, most gamers will have both spare.


