Copying Large File on PC

Bad SATA cable? If the cable is very bad it may 'work', but spend 99% of time sending retries for corrupted packets.

Interestingly, the two reviews on the Startech website are both of failing to talk to drives:

"From my own experience, at full load of ZFS pool using this card the hard drives will randomly fail after some time. If you use SSDs, they will fail even faster. From what I hear in the Unraid/ZFS community this card suffers from interrupt overflow specifically with software raid systems.

Setting the PCI-E port to 1.0 standard helps a bit, but it will fail if you load it too much. Overall, unsatisfactory level of engineering for a card that costs almost as much as an LSI solution."

The card appears to have two ASM1061 SATA controllers behind a Pericom PCIe switch, which is a slightly unusual configuration (somewhat cheaped-out compared with a proper HBA).

Can you swap one of these drives to a motherboard port and try it there?

Theo

Well one approach might be to boot the computer with a live linux distribution, to remove any software issues.

Many thanks Theo :-)

I am still in the return window with Amazon so I will try your suggestion to try and pin it down.

I didn't find the poor reviews when I was researching although it was suggested I should go LSI. I have an older LSI card but when I tried it it seemed to reset the BIOS and it was a pain to get the PC booting again.

OK, got my job for today!

You seem to have performed the Oracle again Theo, connected the 2 x 4 TB SSD directly to the board and copied sweet as a nut! Thank you for helping me get my thinking straight :-)

The LSI options seem to be:

LSI SAS 9207-8i KIT 8-Port 6Gbps SATA+SAS PCI-E 3.0 HBA Kit

LSI LSI00301 (9207-8i) PCI-Express 3.0 x8 SATA / SAS Host Controller Card

The first comes with cables for £150, the second without cables for £100. Mini SATA cables are available for £8.99. It seems sensible to buy them separately or is that a false economy?

Anyway I'll start the return process why I try and find reviews and prices...

I'd buy used - £30-40 on ebay ('lsi sas' was my search). Assuming you get the right connectors, no reason not to buy the cables separately.

(Not familiar with all the models though. On Linux things 'just work' but you'd need to check the Windows driver situation)

Theo

I went for the kit so I got the cables, glad as they don't have clips on the SATA end, I ruined a really nice Lian Li case because I can never get those things undone.

I thought I'd got a DOA but after Googling it was clear that booting is unbelievably sloooow, by the time I found that I had already moved it between slots on the PC! That may have been why I wasn't happy with the older version I had, I haven't had to wait for anything on a computer for more than ten years (I am the weakest link).

One drive not recognised, a 2 TB WD again. I tried it in a couple of slots but it seems to be the drive as the slot works with a different drive. It does work if I attach it using USB and chkdsk says its fine. I think I will strip it off and put it in as a bare drive to see if I can get it recognised then I'll set it up with Partition Wizard. After the issues and crashes I had with the Star Tech kit I guess I shouldn't be too surprised at a screwed up drive?

Onwards and upwards...

That worked as far as it went. Mini Tool Partition Wizard said it was a "bad drive" and Windows Disk Management just says I/O error. I'll check the warranty status tomorrow, at least the local post office know how to send things to the Czech Republic now after the last one!

You could look for a card with a Marvell 88SE1475 in it. x8 connector (fit in x16 slot).

And yes, it does need that heatsink on it. For once, the heatsink isn't just to cover up the chip number :-)

If the card you select has the SFF connector on it, you'll need a cable kit to go with it (1-to-4 cable, 4 cables on a 16 port card).

Paul

It's in warranty, WD has issued an RMA. Bit worrying as I bought six of these in 2020. Even more worrying is that a Crucial MX 2 TB has now also failed, I'll do some tests on it tomorrow. These were all used in a QNAP NAS, 4 of them set up for RAID 6, might that have killed them?

I think the complexity of all this is the major problem! There are multiple drives of different types in one system, they've been in a NAS, they've been [re]partitioned, they've had multiple interfaces.

Over the past 20 years or more of running computers at home I think I have had about one disk drive fail (maybe 2) out of dozens I must have bought.

My older NAS (now retired) had a WD 4TB drive in it that ran for ten years or so without problems and it still reads fine if I want to see some very old archives.

My current NAS has an 8Tb drive bought in 2020, no SMART problems at all.

Yes, it's anecdotal, but KISS is a good philosophy for hardware as well as everything else.

Interesting, I've just sat down to have a cup of tea and think this through!

Thinking out loud a bit....

There are three potential points of failure:

The backplane on the new Silverstone case. The LSI SAS 9207 or its cables. The drives themselves.

I have spent the morning trying different permutations. The top drive in the case won't play with the LSI 9207.

After LOTS of checking fiddling swapping:

I tried it on a USB connector on another PC, no probs recognised immediately, disk check found nothing. Took LSI 9207 out, put 6 x SATA PCIe card in. Connected two of the ports on the card to the backplane. Re-booted. Drive recognised immediately.

When I've had my tea I'll wire up the other drives and ensure they can all be recognised. Assuming they are recognised I think I'll stick to the SATA PCIe card and have reasonable grounds for returning the LSI.

My drives do get swapped around a lot, my 10 or so PCs are a substitute for the Meccano set I never had!

Hope that all makes sense.