ASUS Z9PE-D16/2L 10G PCI NIC seems to disable my SATA drives

Hardware Motherboards
1

Configuration:
Mobo: ASUS Z9PE-D16/2L
CPU: 2x E-2697 v2
RAM: 128GB RDIMM 1600MHz
Drives: all 18 sata ports are occupied. 8x HDDs and 10x SSDs
PCI slot 2 = EVGA 2080 Ti x16 (CPU1)
PCI slot 5 = ASUS XG-C100C (10Gb NIC) x4 (CPU2)
PIKE Slot = 2008 controller

I have installed unraid 6.8.2 on this server.

if I have the 10g nic in slot 5, I lose 4 hard drives. Not on the pike controller, or the ISAS controller. but the basic ones on the mobo. and only SATA3-6 (Sata 1 and 2 are still seen)
the NIC works.

If I move the NIC to PCI 1, it doesnt work, but the 4 drives comes back. because of the 2.5 slot GPU, I dont have any other choices. I dont really see how this can be a PCI lane issue. Im completely at a loss. does anyone have any ideas?

2

According to the block diagram it should work although the PCH has only 10 drives in a block of 6 and 4. What happens if you use pcie6 for the NIC?

Does the GPU run in slot 1?

3

PCIe6 is blocked by the PIKE card. and the GPU cant run in Slot 1 because it would hit the bank of RAM.

After a few reboots the Disks came up. not sure why that happened, but that is now resolved. There still remains the question why the NIC wont work in Slot 1.

4

According to the block diagram slot 1 and 2 share bandwidth. I suspect the switching tries to force x8 mode and the GPU doesn’t play nicely.

It’s a nice board but you are using it at its limit. Maybe a threadripper is in your not too distant future :slight_smile:

5

yeah… you are probably right. this board was free though. so Ill have to make due for a while.

I have a pcie riser x16 so when I get my new case, I might move the gpu to slot 1 and see if I can free up some other slots. I want to put another hba and a gtx 1070 in there for transcoding

6

Sadly, losing SATA ports is common. I routinely see SATA ports being sacrificed to the NVME gods, but I haven’t seen (yet) SATA ports being lost to filled PCI-E slots. Now that the system is back, there is hope (but also lurking danger). Test it without the 1070 on the riser. That’s asking for trouble, especially in a loaded system like yours. If you have a free slot, try a simple SATA card. They are cheap, I always have a few in the drawer. According to the specs, 6 out of the 8 on-mobo SATA ports are SATA2 only, they most likely hold back your SSDs.

7

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