Brand New M1015 Controller... Current owners - Help me out!

[TravisT]

I've been reading up on the IBM M1015 controllers lately, and I decided that would be the best route to go to give me the SATA port density I need for my FreeNAS server. I've also had numerous problems with the SuperMicro backplanes I ordered, and I'm hoping it has something to do with my onboard controller (noisy signals, etc.)

I just received my M1015 and I'm waiting on my cables. I can't get into the webBIOS <ctrl>H, it just skips over and loads windows (have the card installed in my desktop for now). I am able to access the card from MSM, and it reads it fine. Is this an issue?

Also, the functionality of the MSM seems nice to have. Can I have that installed on my desktop and use it to access the card in my FreeNAS server once it's been flashed to IT-mode? Just curious, as I haven't found anything that covers that anywhere.

Also, any other suggestions before I flash it? Should I worry about not getting into the BIOS, or just press on with flashing it?

 

[StephenFry]

I just got my M1015 today, also waiting on cables, hehe. I'm planning on flashing it tonight to 9211-IT, after making a bracket for it. I'll report back.
Together, we can do this!! ;)

 

[StephenFry]

Okay, I was a bit hasty and didn't try pressing Ctrl-H, so I can't say for sure I have the same issue you do, HOWEVER:

after flashing the key-combination has changed to Ctrl-C and upon pressing that, I get (paraphrasing here, it goes by very quickly): "LSI Config Utility will start after initialization" and then nothing, it shows something blabla 14.00.00.0.0blablah (It's the P14 product revision) and then just continues to boot.

Maybe it's because we don't have any drives connected yet?


EDIT: I'm in!

In my motherboard's BIOS, I had to set the bootorder to first boot from the LSI card (of course I don't want that, but that's apparently not important).

Now that it thinks I want to firstly boot from the LSI card, it does what it says, and after initialization of the card, it loads up the LSI Corp Config Utility, where I can change very few settings at the moment.

On a Dutch forum, I read that someone needed access to this BIOS for some troubleshooting with spin-up of certain drives, so I'm happy to keep the BIOS in, even at the cost of a slightly longer boot time.

 

[TravisT]

Okay, I was a bit hasty and didn't try pressing Ctrl-H, so I can't say for sure I have the same issue you do, HOWEVER:

after flashing the key-combination has changed to Ctrl-C and upon pressing that, I get (paraphrasing here, it goes by very quickly): "LSI Config Utility will start after initialization" and then nothing, it shows something blabla 14.00.00.0.0blablah (It's the P14 product revision) and then just continues to boot.

Maybe it's because we don't have any drives connected yet?


EDIT: I'm in!

In my motherboard's BIOS, I had to set the bootorder to first boot from the LSI card (of course I don't want that, but that's apparently not important).

Now that it thinks I want to firstly boot from the LSI card, it does what it says, and after initialization of the card, it loads up the LSI Corp Config Utility, where I can change very few settings at the moment.

On a Dutch forum, I read that someone needed access to this BIOS for some troubleshooting with spin-up of certain drives, so I'm happy to keep the BIOS in, even at the cost of a slightly longer boot time.

Good to hear. I'm with ya on the BIOS. I'll give that a try and see if I can get in the BIOS. Any problems flashing? Did you go to p14?

 

[paleoN]

I'm planning on flashing it tonight to 9211-IT, after making a bracket for it.

From what I understand it should be a standard PCI bracket. If you have an old PCI card laying around you should just be able to take the bracket from it. At least this is my plan for when I buy mine.

 

[StephenFry]

Good to hear. I'm with ya on the BIOS. I'll give that a try and see if I can get in the BIOS. Any problems flashing? Did you go to p14?

Flashing something for the first time is always scary, because you don't know what information is supposed to be shown on the screen - and I'm always holding my breath for fear the operation might freeze or return an error!

Fortunately, everything went as advertised. Kept getting "successfully this" and "successfully that" messages.

I used the package from ServeTheHome, which does contain the P14 update.

Just out of curiosity, I tried once again to get into the LSI BIOS after having set the motherboard BIOS back to standard - no dice. So at least on my machine, it's a reproducible issue.

From what I understand it should be a standard PCI bracket. If you have an old PCI card laying around you should just be able to take the bracket from it. At least this is my plan for when I buy mine.

I ripped the bracket off my suspect PCI-e SiI controller. Which is why I reported back so quickly ;) I'll fix it with an old bracket from somewhere, but for now it won't have a bracket - that'll teach it! Hopefully it will learn from its mistakes...

 

[TravisT]

Yea, I will run mine bracketless until I can dig around and find one or order one. I did change the boot order and told it to boot from the LSI card first, and that allowed me into the BIOS. If the BIOS stays the same after flashing it to IT mode, I'll probably keep it. I like the idea of the staggered spinup features that appears to be available there. Any idea on the MSM from a remote machine after flashing?

 

[TravisT]

Found another bad WD Blue drive in my bunch. The nice thing is the last one I RMA'd was replaced with a WD Black 6Gb/s SATAIII Drive. Maybe I'll be lucky and get another one of them when I RMA this one.

Hopefully my cables come in tomorrow or the next day. I've been having another issue with my SuperMicro drive bays, and I'm really hoping that using the M1015 will remedy that problem. I have three of the drive bays (15 drives total), and I'd really like for them to work. Will probably try flashing BIOS tonight or tomorrow. Will report my success.

Edit: Not sure where my head was when I was hooking up my new drive. First, it wasn't replaced with a WD Black drive. Still a WD Caviar Blue, just has a black label cause it was warrantied. Second, even the black drives aren't 6Gb/s SATA III. I blame not enough sleep...

 

[StephenFry]

I like the idea of the staggered spinup features that appears to be available there. Any idea on the MSM from a remote machine after flashing?

Yeah, I was thinking of using the staggered spinup as well. It's not a necessity as far as the PSU goes, but it gives me the idea I'm being sympathetic to my devices, haha.

Can't help you with your MSM question, maybe someone else has experience with this?

 

[TravisT]

I should know soon enough. I'll try to give it a whirl tonight after flashing, hopefully.

 

[TravisT]

Just flashed my board a few minutes ago. Everything seemed to go fine, only problem is that I have no BIOS screen for it. I ran the following command:

sas2flsh -o -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom

thinking I would have a BIOS option. I went in my mobo BIOS and the LSI card is not even an option anymore. Windows recognizes the card as an LSI Adapter, SAS2 2008 Falcon.

Still no cables

 

[StephenFry]

I went in my mobo BIOS and the LSI card is not even an option anymore.

Still no cables

Very odd that you don't get a BIOS message from the card. What happens if you play dumb and press ctrl-C anyway during bootstrap?

Same here on the cables; was hoping to play around with the NAS this weekend - no such luck. 9,000 webstores to choose from, and we pick the two that are probably dropshipping the cables from China...

 

[TravisT]

I ordered mine from monoprice and they came in today. Decent price, and I just hooked it up. Drives are recognized, but I still don't get any messages at all on boot about the controller.

I'll play around with it a little in the next few days. Just destroyed my ZFS raid 10 pool to do some individual disk testing with the backplanes I have - hoping they will test much better than they did in the past.

Will report back as soon as I have some solid info.

 

[StephenFry]

My cables are still nowhere to be seen. I looked around for other shops, but I decided not to order them here!

 

[TravisT]

Here's what I ordered:

http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10254&cs_id=1025406&p_id=8186&seq=1&format=2

 

[TravisT]

Also got a strange new error reported:

Aug 31 17:18:03 freenas kernel: mps0: IOC Fault 0x40002622, Resetting
Aug 31 17:19:01 freenas kernel: (da0:mps0:0:5:0): SCSI command timeout on device handle 0x000a SMID 479
Aug 31 17:19:03 freenas kernel: mps0: IOC Fault 0x40001500, Resetting

Haven't researched this any yet, but if anyone has any idea what this means, feel free to save me the time of researching it...

 

[TravisT]

Haven't seen the error above again after a couple reboots.

The good news is that my single disk transfer rates have increased from about 120MB/s per drive to 140MB/s per drive.

The bad news is that my transfer rates in the drive bays is now reading about 45MB/s per drive, which is still not going to cut it. Really pissed about that situation, and now I have an enterprise-class SATA controller. The only logical problem could have been that there was added noise on the SATA interfaces that my onboard SATA controller couldn't handle. Now that I'm using a different SATA controller, I think it rules that out. I still have two more 5-drive hot-swap enclosures to try (have 3x5-drive bays installed).

Will do some more testing and am excited to see the results before putting this into "production".

 

[Stephens]

I can second the recommendation of monoprice for decent cables of all kind at fair (inexpensive) prices.

 

[TravisT]

Update. I updated my mobo bios, and now I can see the LSI initialization screen and access the BIOS (as long as I have the LSI card set as the first boot device).

The drive bay/backplane problem I had was also figured out. I found that the drives are not being inserted into the backplane far enough, due to design of the backplanes themselves. I have emailed Supermicro for advice on how to move forward. If I don't hear anything back, then I will try my hand at modifying/fixing them myself. Hopefully they will come through somehow.

 

[andoy31]

Just checking any Significant differences frm p13 to p14 of the lsi firmware?

I have the m1015 and have patched it to firmware p13, however not sure if it's worth the effort to patch to p14.

Thanks!