Hi guys, new here but have been watching Wendel and lvl1 for a bit now, it was what actually inspired me to finally break down and build my NAS that I’ve been wanting for at least a few years now. After a bit of researching here on YouTube, my final parts list came down to a SilverStone CS381 case, a AsRock Rack W680D4U-2L2T/G5 Micro-ATX Server Motherboard with an i9 12900K proc and 2 kits of Crucial CT2K32G48C40U5 for a total of 128 gig. I’m cooling it with a Noctua NH-L9i-17xx cooler, which I hope will be sufficient as I’m planning on undervolting the proc.
For storage, I’m using a Samsung 980 Pro with heat sink for the boot drive, and the drives in the array are 6x Seagate Exos X20 ST20000NM007D 20TB 7200 RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" which will be running off of a Broadcom 05-50077-03 8 port Int 12gb/s SAS/data Tri-mode HBS that is going in the one available x16 PCIe 5.0 slot. I purchased 2 Intel Optane SSD P1600X SSDPEK1A118GA01 M.2 2280 118GB drives for caching, but due to a lack of spare m.2 slots on the MB, I will unfortunately only be using one of them.
I ended up getting a StarTech M2 PCIe SSD Adapter - x4 PCIe 3.0 NVMe / AHCI / NGFF / M-Key - Low and Full Profile - SSD PCIe M.2 Adapter (PEX4M2E1) to put it in, as I have one x4 PCIe 4.0 slot available on the MB. I was hoping to find a x4 PCIe 4.0 to two PCIe 3.0 M.2 drives as I’d think being 4.0 it would have sufficient bandwidth to handle two 3.0 M.2’s, but after a bit of searching, I couldn’t find one, so maybe not? Oh well, worst case I’ll have a spare, they weren’t horribly expensive at least, especially compared to the rest of the other components.
Lastly, I’m powering it all with a Seasonic Focus SPX-750(2021), 750W 80+ Platinum PSU. I know I could have probably bought a prebuilt NAS for about the same $ as I have into this thing, but then I’d possibly be stuck with proprietary hardware and software, this way I’ll definitely be learning a lot as this is all pretty much new to me, but I guess I like a challenge?
So, Finally, on to my issues. I installed everything (other than the drives as they’re in the case, and I’m initially just testing the basics first before squeezing it into that little case) onto the board on the bench and fired it up, thru the VGA output on the board. It boots up, but for some reason, it doesn’t see the USB keyboard. I wish it has a dedicated PS/2 mouse/keyboard port on it, but that’s apparently too old school, but it wasn’t too old school for them to put a 9 pin serial port on it?
Regardless, I first noticed the issue when I was booting it up initially while trying to get into the BIOS to upgrade it to the latest version, and when I hit F2, it just continued the boot process. I at first used an old but working fine Dell USB keyboard, and after a couple of tries rebooting with the same result, I switched over to a new wired/wireless keyboard and the same thing happened.
I spoke with ASRock tech support, he said he’d never heard about and issue like mine on this board, usually USB keyboards just work. I’ve had experiences in the past when that wasn’t necessarily so, but then again, that was a long time ago, they’ve long since sorted this out. He suggested to check for any bent pins in the CPU socket, as apparently the USB controller is now on the CPU. I haven’t tried that yet, I’d prefer that be a last resort after exhausting other options.
He also said I could use the IPLM (or something like that) to remote into it and see if I could control it that way. I’ve never used it but he described connecting into it via another machine and using s browser, I’ll look into trying that as well, just need to read up on it a bit to figure it out. I thought I’d toss all this out there and see if I can get some other ideas of something simple that I might have missed, so I can avoid for now doing either of those things. I’ve built number of computers over the years, but this board is certainly a bit different than the normal pedestrian boards I’m used to working with, so I figured it couldn’t hurt detailing my system and the issues I’m having, in case I missed something stupid simple that I didn’t know about. Any suggestions, thoughts or advice are greatly appreciated, because at this point I’m stumped, frustrating it has to be with something so basic, I expected that to happen when I’m installing the software, not trying to just use the keyboard… Thanks!