Question SAS/SATA drives that work with Windows 11

[boondocks]

CSM allows for using MBR
UEFI forces using GPT

Cards are going to always be secondary to BIOS/UEFI in terms of POST / boot

For the BIO/UEFI > NVME it's still waiting for the AIC to post which is why in most cases you just want a HBA as it doesn't need to post and just allows for more ports to be used for drives by using the PCIE slot.

For the boot issue... is it possible one of the drives has an MBR / GPT partition from a prior install of an OS?

Good question. I used to have the boot drive as my 1TB Crucial SSD. But I wiped it and use it for my D: /Documents drive now so I don't think it's the problem.

I'm still having slow transfer times between drives. Could well be Windows, but if it is I can't figure it out. I keep the drives defragged pretty well, and some of them (most) have been defragged/consolidated with the Disktrix defrag util.
I mean I've had problems with individual drives in the past, but this is more wide-ranging now. If it's a Win11 problem, I am at a loss to fix it other than what I've done.
I do run chkdsk /f pretty often on the boot drive ('cause Windoze updates!) but not recently on the others. I guess I better.

Note this is only drive > drive on the machine and backups to my second pc that have slowed to rediculous rates. Transfers online seem to be hitting my (slow) ADSL limits with no problems.

But say I wanted to try another board, one that would not be such a pita for my pc to boot up. What affordable board for an old retired guy with limited funds? I'm not opposed to an 8i board/backplane combo if necessary, but I pretty much need to do >8 drives attached.

I'm not using any of the SATA ports on my mobo, but an 8i SAS board and 6 mobo ports still leaves me short of where I need to be.

Suggestions on affordable boards/backplanes? I'm just sick of the boot times that include shuttng down and restarting multiple times, even in CSM mode I now see.

Believe me, all advice is sorely appreciated. I've been a pc guy since pre-MSDOS days but I don't claim to know everything.

 

[Tech Junky]

@boondocks

A quick sanity check would be move 2 drives to the SATA ports and copy files between them. If they work at speed then it's the card. If they're still slow then it's something in the MOBO causing the issue.

I run a R10 on a ASRock Steel Legend and get 400MB/s+ out of them using WD Red's. Mind you that setup is running Linux and not Windows.

My laptop has dual NVME drives though and is running W11 and I can hit 1.5GB/s between drives which is slower than they're rated for being that each slot is different @ Gen 3 or 4 but, even G3 should be hitting ~3GB/s potentially when taking into account overhead and OS. I'll still take the 1.5GB/s though.

My TB4 enclosure tests out at 3.1/2.9GB/s in Crystal Disk. No way I get those speeds IRL though. If I spread the copies into different threads though i can get better speeds rather than just dumping everything in a single copy.

So, it comes down to threads being used, data sizes, and medium. One trick I've used in the past is multi-threading an FTP to my server using File Zilla and let it hammer away with 10 threads to move data a bit quicker. Windows management of transfers though generally has sucked since the inception of it. TerraCopy kind of works.

Defrag / errors aren't likely the issue though. I suppose there could be a bad connect or limited power situation somewhere with that many dries. I would check the logs but, Windows is clunky when trying to figure that out. If you boot it into Linux though you can tail -f the syslog and watch things in real time to see if there's an issue behind the scenes with either the disks or connections.

 

[boondocks]

Well I don't run Linux, but I can move some drives to SATA ports and check it out. Good suggestion.

I use Fastcopy sometims, it's usually pretty reliable but right this instant I'm not sure what's happening. In the past I've swapped around SATA cables and found ones not up to par, they can fool you sometimes by semi-working. When I had only "regular" SATA cables, Almost all are 1m length because of the distance to the drives, + snaked around to get to all the drives in my top pedestal. Sometimes they appear to get damaged via the routing, I guess.,

There should not be any power problems with an almost brand new Seasonic PX-1000 psu, but I can test by disconnecting a few sets of drives and see if any change I guess.

But in in addition to that, inthe AM I will follow your suggestion to swap a few drives to SATA ports on the mobo and see what's what. If obvious speed up in transfers then I'll be looking for a new SAS/SATA board I guess.

If it turns out to be power related, though unlikely, that's an easy, though expensive fix, and I've been running at minimum 13 drives for quite some time.

I'll get back to you about those boards if it turns out it's the board or just Windoze showing it's backside. But at least I have a few plans of action to pursue to troubleshoot.

Thanks!

 

[Oyeve]

I had a board like that in my system. I was running around 10 SSD drives but needed more ports and got one. Worked fine but for some odd reason every time I used Corsair's utility to change my systems RGB fans or even try to update the software from Corsair, it would hard lock my system and I had to manually turn it off. Then on reboot the file system took forever to load and the HD light was solid for the longest. I fixed by ditching the card (after researching it was indeed the cause for the issue) and got rid of all my sub-2tb drives and replacing with 3x8tb drives. Loads better. That card was a nightmare.

 

[boondocks]

So I went and bought a 9211-8i and an expander board. The boot problems are driving me nuts with this board.