Short Review: Edging ASMedia 1166 PCIe Gen3 x2 M.2 to 6 x SATA HBA Chipset. It doesn't suck šŸ‘

Hardware Hub Storage
, ,
142

Only PCIe 3.0, again? And only 2 lanes for 9 ports? What were they thinking?

Is it so hard to make a low-power Gen 4 controller chip :sob:

1 Like
143

SATA 3 is 6Gbit/s (Half-Duplex), 2 Lanes of PCIe Gen 3 are just under 2GByte/s (Full-Duplex).

So 54 Gbit through a 2 GByte hole. 3.3 to 1 oversubscribtion, assuming all drives are hit full tilt read or write only.
Does not sound bad to me.

144

Any oversubscription is wasteful, spinning rust is slow enough as-is.

It would also be very nice to have a chip for use where only a single lane is available. 1 lane of Gen 3 is barely enough for 4 drives. And even that is not enough if you want to make use of the cache on the drives (small and inconsequential as it may be)

145

ASM1166, 1164, 1064, and 1061 all support x1. ASM1062 probably does as well but ASRock doesnā€™t spec it and, realistically, youā€™ll end up with 1166 or maybe 1164 unless you look pretty hard.

Itā€™s my understanding the cost of qualifying 16 GT/s operation limits the companies that can do it. Realtek should have the resources, though, so my guess would be more that the volume customers for RTL9101 wanted lower cost more than they wanted the higher performance.

146

The only HBA I have ever encountered that didnā€™t work at all when it didnā€™t get all the PCIe lanes it wanted was an Adaptec RAID Controller from around 2010. During POST a message would appear ā€œHey, Iā€™m not getting the 8 PCIe lanes I want, Iā€™ll prevent the system from booting - Fuck you very much!ā€

1 Like
147

I cannot confirm this, Iā€™ve updated my ASM1064 (A+E key adapter) to 241224-0000-00 and passthrough to TrueNAS VM works just fine, originally this adapter came with 211108-0000-00 and it also worked just fine.

Sadly no matter what firmware I flash I am still getting errors like these:

Nov 19 02:31:15 pve kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.2: AER: Correctable error message received from 0000:00:1d.2
Nov 19 02:31:15 pve kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.2: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Correctable, type=Physical Layer, (Receiver ID)
Nov 19 02:31:15 pve kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.2:   device [8086:54b2] error status/mask=00000001/00002000
Nov 19 02:31:15 pve kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.2:    [ 0] RxErr                  (First)
Nov 19 02:31:15 pve kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.2: AER: Correctable error message received from 0000:00:1d.2 (no details found
Nov 19 02:31:15 pve kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.2: AER: Multiple Correctable error message received from 0000:00:1d.2
Nov 19 02:31:15 pve kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.2: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Correctable, type=Physical Layer, (Transmitter ID)
Nov 19 02:31:15 pve kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.2:   device [8086:54b2] error status/mask=00001001/00002000
Nov 19 02:31:15 pve kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.2:    [ 0] RxErr                  (First)
Nov 19 02:31:15 pve kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.2:    [12] Timeout               
Nov 19 02:31:15 pve kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.2: AER: Multiple Correctable error message received from 0000:00:1d.2 (no details found
Nov 19 02:31:15 pve kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1d.2: AER: Correctable error message received from 0000:00:1d.2

Only way to fix this is to completely disable ASPM in grub via pcie_aspm=off.

148

Havenā€™t seen any AER errors on my four active ASM 1166 units (2 from the review in this thread, bought 2 additional ones later), hopefully that doesnā€™t indicate an issue with the PCB/soldering on your controllers!

149

Wellā€¦ This might as well be caused by mi chinese mini-pc (Firebat T8), or the fact that this adapter fits the m.2 wifi slot (A+E). This mini-pc doesnā€™t even boot with this adapter plugged in with ASPM enable due to flood of these error (even with no drive attached). :smiley:

Pics and full story here: [N100] - Firebat T8 - Inner stuff and some tests - #79 by IreuN

In the end Iā€™ve just disabled ASPM and it is working correctly in my TrueNAS VM (with 2xHDD).

Also this might be handy, iā€™ve tried every possible firmware, and saved lspci -vvv from each.
Here Iā€™ve posted them as revisions from oldest to newest. Remember that this is based on ASM1064 adapter :slight_smile: Revisions Ā· ASM1064 lspci log Ā· GitHub

150

Iā€™ve recently bought one of these cards with an RTL 9101 (see
https://forum.level1techs.com/t/post-what-new-thing-you-acquired-recently/149881/23851 ) and another one in the M2 form factor based on ASM1166 chip.

Any tips regarding firmwares or gotchas ?