ASRock E3C224: a note of warning

[Mlovelace]

That's a plus!

I still find it very "amateur-ish" to make such a stupid mistake.

I have two of these board in use and have never seen any of these issues. So it could just be a bad board...

 

[cyberjock]

Did you notice those comments are from a year ago? :P

 

[Mlovelace]

Did you notice those comments are from a year ago? :p

Haha nope, sorry

 

[grinderx]

1. Avoid Marvell/JMicron/anything but Intel SATA controllers.
2. Why on earth do you want quad GbE controllers?

Do yourself a favor and get an X10SL7-F instead.

That said, the C22x chipsets support the entire AHCI spec, including hot-swap. If ASRock says it's not supported, ask them if it's just a minor documentation mistake.

I am a server guy that wants to build a home server with Xen or ESXi as a personal project (GPU passthrough, a FreeNAS VM, etc) , hence my interest regarding the quad port GbE, Hot Swap, out-of-band management, etc. I 've narrowed it down to the ASRock E3C224-4L, C226M WS or the Supermicro X10SLQ (I know it's not a C22x chipset, but a Q87 rather).

I 've emailed ASRock as well as its UK distributor, but no answer so far. The manual says that the E3C224 series supports Hot Swap without further clarifications. The specs in the products webpage restricts that only to the Marvell SATA controller (by the way, what's wrong with Marvell?).

Thanks for your suggestion with the Supermicro motherboard (I don't need any SAS ports though) and for clarifying the Hot Swap support with the Intel C22x chipsets. Any further comments are welcome. :)

 

[Ericloewe]

If you need more than 6 HDDs, in practice, you need an SAS controller (or an LGA2011 system). The only SATA controllers that just work are Intel's. The next best thing are SAS HBAs, which are just as good, but more expensive.

If you really need quad-GbE, the X10SLM+-LN4F is a probably the best choice in the segment, but you're limited to two PCI-e slots (one 3.0 x16 and one 2.0 x4, IIRC). If you want something like an HBA and 10GbE controller or GPU, maybe an X10SL7-F with an Intel dual-port i350 GbE controller is a better option, since you can give both the HBA and future 10GbE controller/GPU 8x PCI-e 3.0.

Also, for FreeNAS in a VM, you'll want to read jgreco's guides on the matter. You'll find that passing through an SAS controller is probably something you'll want to do.

Though, with everything you want to throw at this, separate boxes and/or a beefier Haswell-EP system might make more sense.

 

[grinderx]

If you need more than 6 HDDs, in practice, you need an SAS controller (or an LGA2011 system). The only SATA controllers that just work are Intel's. The next best thing are SAS HBAs, which are just as good, but more expensive.

I know, but I don't want to use more than 6. 2 in RAID1 for the hypervisor and VM datastore and another 4 for the NAS VM in a RAID5 mode.

If you really need quad-GbE, the X10SLM+-LN4F is a probably the best choice in the segment, but you're limited to two PCI-e slots (one 3.0 x16 and one 2.0 x4, IIRC). If you want something like an HBA and 10GbE controller or GPU, maybe an X10SL7-F with an Intel dual-port i350 GbE controller is a better option, since you can give both the HBA and future 10GbE controller/GPU 8x PCI-e 3.0.

No real need for a quad port NIC. Just want to have some fun with same things that I have at my workplace at home as well.

Also, for FreeNAS in a VM, you'll want to read jgreco's guides on the matter. You'll find that passing through an SAS controller is probably something you'll want to do.

Thanks will check those guides.

Though, with everything you want to throw at this, separate boxes and/or a beefier Haswell-EP system might make more sense.

Don't want to have more boxes for this home project.

 

[marbus90]

FreeNAS works best if you passtrough a whole HBA with the NAS disks attached to the VM. Depending on the Hypervisor you'll need another RAID-Controller to support a mirrored boot volume.

Apart from that, you shouldn't use raidz1 anymore. If any of the other disks encounter another error during rebuild of that single disk, your pool crashes in the worst case. best case, you only lose some files due to corruption.

 

[grinderx]

FreeNAS works best if you passtrough a whole HBA with the NAS disks attached to the VM. Depending on the Hypervisor you'll need another RAID-Controller to support a mirrored boot volume.

Makes sense, but it's going to be a home project. I don't have high expectations for uber performance.

Apart from that, you shouldn't use raidz1 anymore. If any of the other disks encounter another error during rebuild of that single disk, your pool crashes in the worst case. best case, you only lose some files due to corruption.

Sure, but it's just going to be a home project as already mentioned. One of my colleagues has a RAID0 array for his NAS box at home, so even worse :p

 

[marbus90]

It's not about performance, it's about reliability. If $hypverisors disk passtrough takes a shit, FreeNAS and all your data does too. You will not receive support, even if you claim it's for home use only.

 

[qwerion]

Just another note here. The network adapter drivers on this (Intel i210) do not support WOL. There goes the last 3 hours of head banging.

Code:

$ifconfig -m igb0
igb0: flags=8943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
        options=400b8<VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,JUMBO_MTU,VLAN_HWCSUM,VLAN_HWTSO>
        capabilities=507bb<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,JUMBO_MTU,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4,TSO6,LRO,VLAN_HWFILTER,VLAN_HWTSO>
        ether bc:5f:f4:c8:be:77
        inet 192.168.1.40 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255

NAS4Free user also reporting no WOL on this mobo:
http://forums.nas4free.org/viewtopic.php?t=5918

 

[marbus90]

Manual says it is supported. Check the BIOS if that option is disabled there.

 

[qwerion]

Manual says it is supported. Check the BIOS if that option is disabled there.

What, the mobo manual? Yes it says its supported in there, and how to enable it in BIOS (and of course its enabled). Presumably WOL works in Windows since just about all network adapters have WOL support in their Windows drivers.

 

[Bruno Salvador]

Well, manager to unbrick the IPMI chip thanks to ASRock which sent me a DOS utility to reset the controller and restore it to factory settings...

Can you upload the tool? I have a
E3C224D2I
and the IPMI is broken as well.

 

[Bruno Salvador]

I got the tool but no sucessful results.
After contacting Asrock for support they oficially do not give support to people in Brazil and Latin America.

But the world is made of awsome people, right?
An awsome Asrock employee sent new IPMI chip for me via USPS, he paid on his own pocket.

T0 thank you I have sent back 2 kg of genuine Brazilian coffee :)