[mythtv-users] OT: Problems with two hard drive controllers with an ASUS P5Q-E motherboard

Jerry mythtv at hambone.e4ward.com
Wed Jan 22 22:53:23 UTC 2014


I'm having issues with both of my hard drives in my aging P5Q-E system.  I
have a rather new Corsair Neutron 64GB SSD as my system drive and a 3 TB
Seagate data drive.

I have the 3 TB drive hooked up to the onboard controller.  It gives me
errors occasionally when I record a show.  I have no errors shown when
running smartctl -a.  I was unable to get the SSD working well with the
onboard controller.  It was giving me errors constantly.  I sent it back
three times until I determined I needed an external controller.

Right now, I'm using a Startech PEXSAT34 controller which uses the Marvell
88SE9128 chipset.  It seems to be working well.  The only problem I have,
and I'm beginning to think I'm just going to have to live with, is that I
don't have a HDD activity light for devices attached to the card.  I like
to know when my system is active and the lack of feedback is mildly
annoying.

I attempted to remedy the situation by ordering a controller with an LED
header (Syba SD-PEX40054 with the Marvell 88SE9230 chipset).  It has the
header and a pass through from the motherboard so you can see all of your
HDD activity.  I got it connected, and it stayed mostly dimly lit,
flickering brighter or briefly going off.  It wasn't what I wanted but I
was willing to live with it.

This newer card had more features (RAID capability and SSD Caching
ability).  Unfortunately, with the first card, I got major hard drive
errors.  I sent it back and received the replacement today.  It doesn't
miserably fail like the first card, but it has a good failure rate.

What I don't understand is why the newer card would fail with a similar
chipset.  I did not configure the drive as a RAID drive; I am not familiar
with RAID and I like to keep things as simple as possible.

Could the reason for these various failures be a failing PCIe bus or
something similar?  Why would the current controller I'm using still work?
I'm pretty confused.

I did run the long test on my SSD drive and it came back clean.

Frankly, I don't even need an SSD drive on this combined FE/BE.  I didn't
have issues with my five or so year-old 1 TB hard drive.  I just thought it
was an easy upgrade.  I have a feeling I'd have trouble with a newer hard
drive as my system drive, so I suppose I might as well stick with the SSD.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks!
Jerry
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