IBM Disk Controller In MSI Motherboard Question

[BobCochran]

I am thinking of buying this disk controller

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-ServeRA...=190621067260&ps=63&clkid=6117002069637916766

and installing it on an MSI 890GXM-G65 motherboard which has the latest BIOS installed. I am aware that I will have to flash the M1015 to IT Mode.

I am worried that MSI motherboards may have a problem with PCIe disk controllers, because I have not had good luck with Dell Perc 5/i controllers (which I haven't firmware updated in any way) installed on the same motherboard. The Dell controller seems to emit errors about the disks after a while and I wonder if it is a motherboard issue.

Should I replace my MSI motherboard and then add a disk controller or is it worth my time to buy the above controller card, flash it, and try it out on my motherboard? I've run out of SATA connections and have no room to add more hard drives.

Bob

 

[survive]

Hi BobCochran,

I think it's really a crap shoot when it comes to getting a "consumer" motherboard to work with something other than a video card in the 16x PCI-e slot. There's no reason why it shouldn't work, but I've seen cases where the controller BIOS can't be loaded because it doesn't fit into memory (this is one of those primitive "brain stem" legacy things with PC's). I ran into this with a Gigabyte AMD board and I just had to be persistent with their support people, once I made my case to the right guy I had a new BIOS that sorted it right out. If I recall correctly even though the BIOS didn't load, the operating system still found the card & loaded a driver for it, the only catch was that I couldn't boot from it.

Is that a 890GX AMD board or a G65 Intel board? I think there is a thing with some Intel boards that involved masking off a couple of pins on the PERC 5 with tape\nail polish in order to make them boot, see here for more details:

http://www.overclock.net/t/359025/perc-5-i-raid-card-tips-and-benchmarks <--look for "SMBus Issue with Intel Chipsets"

I think that card is a steal at $70.00. Personally I would sure give it a shot. For what it's worth I've had better luck with consumer-level AMD chipsets & 4X\8X PCI-e devices than Intel based boards.

Check out monoprice.com for SFF-8087 cables & Molex to SATA power converters.

http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10254#1025406
http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10226#1022604

The Fractal Design drive layout works real well with those cables.

-Will

 

[BobCochran]

Hi Will,

Thank you for your insights, I really appreciate them. My MSI 890GXM-G65 motherboard is an AMD board, for the Phenom II 1090T and similar socket AM3 processors. I need to check the chipset -- I suspect it is an AMD chipset. This is an older motherboard by now.

I will look into getting the IBM controller card. Right now I'm attempting to transfer a friend's photo collection -- 810 Gb of photos -- over the wire to my CIFS share on FreeNAS 8.0.3-p1, x64 build, and I'm having frustrating network connection timeouts. I am not sure what the problem may be. Perhaps it is ZFS related. I'll head to bed and hope the transfer is complete in the morning.

Bob