ASUS P9A-I/C2550/SAS/4L

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Kristian

Active Member
Jun 1, 2013
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0301 is working okay. Since updating I encountered 1 freeze when shutting down the system, but apart from that its working okayish...
Hope you will be satisfied.
I am still very disapointed.
 

AlexH

New Member
Sep 12, 2014
7
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Germany
Neverending story... Asus changed the faulty motherboards with BIOS 0208 and send us two boards with the older 0206. Those boards were also not flashable (File verification error again) and I contacted the Asus support again. They changed the boards another time and send them with BIOS 0301 then. But when testing I had the same issues with the 0301 BIOS as with the older ones. Freezes in BIOS, Freezes when booting to an OS or OS setup or just a DOS Environment...

I will now use a Supermicro or Asrock Avoton board instead and stick some PCIe HBA...Those boards run without problems with the Power supplys and memory modules I tried.

So all in all one should avoid buying that Asus board as long as they will not have a proper working BIOS I guess.
 
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Hans Höök

New Member
Nov 25, 2014
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miniknight said he was running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on it.
I am too, sort of, but it si not working.
The Marvell 88SE9485 SAS controller does not work for me. I have manually loaded the mvsas module but there are no storage disks....

Anybody able to use Ubuntu 14.04 on the mobo and access the SAS attached disks?

Thanks for any hints!
 

Vyacheslav

New Member
Jan 3, 2015
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Have only one problem with this board - after power outage (cold boot) - the system hang with black screen and blinking cursor at upper right corner. So to boot the OS I need to manually Reset or Soft Power Off/ Power On the system. This only happens at cold boot.
Anyone have the same problem?
Thanks.
 

Kristian

Active Member
Jun 1, 2013
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I have the exact same problem... Hell, I am so annoyed when it comes to this board.
 

Vyacheslav

New Member
Jan 3, 2015
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Report to Asus, waiting for the answer. Currently running latest bios, 16 GB Transcend ECC, 60 GB M2 SSD.
 

dba

Moderator
Feb 20, 2012
1,477
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San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA
Hoping folks have had the time to see the ASUS P9A-I series. Rumor has it that at least one version is coming to North America. Also, rumor has it I may be picking a ASUS P9A-I/C2550/SAS/4L up tomorrow. This is one of the motherboards we previewed here.

This is the Intel Atom C2550 (4C/ 4T) based motherboard with quad i354 gigabit LAN, and 4x SFF-8087 connectors tied to Marvell 88SE9485 controllers.

Now, the fun part is that I should get the motherboard Wednesday and will be getting married on Saturday.

I do plan to have an initial piece up in short order, likely written on the 21+ hour journey to the honeymoon spot. That will mean I need to collect data quickly from the platform. If you do have any requests, please let me know and I will see what I can get done time wise.
I hereby promise to never mention to anyone that you put "getting married" and "picking up a motherboard" in the same sentence.
 

Kristian_Stracke

New Member
Nov 29, 2014
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Because the LSI 9211-8i in my server died yesterday I was trying to deactivate my p9a-I this afternoon... It was hanging after the is was loaded. Checked temperatures: 72 Celsius CPU, 50 Celsius the board... A bit high I thought... So I did some fan mods and I was okay for some hours. Then: system hung again. Reboot to bios, went upstairs to help my wife: system hung up in bios.. I replaced the ram already, switched the ssd, have no other devices connected atm.

Any ideas? I could post some errors out of the event logs from bios if that helps. Because there is a whole lot of error messages: for example: unknown chipset, dxe bs driver encountered a aborted error. Any input welcome
 

Kristian

Active Member
Jun 1, 2013
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according to ASUS:
Upper Non-Critical (UNC): 70 ° C
Upper Non-Critical (UC) 75 ° C
Upper Non-Recoverable (UNR): 80 °

it is working up to a certain point and then: hangs...
Screenshot (1).png
CPU after fan mod: 34C
Board 50C
 

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PigLover

Moderator
Jan 26, 2011
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Since folks have revived this old thread (thanks DBA)...\

Has anyone ever tried the Marvell controller with an expander? It theory the chip supports them but I don't know if the BIOS/driver supplied implements it.
 

Kristian

Active Member
Jun 1, 2013
347
84
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As I "think" I have found the problem *knock on wood* (it could be the board temperature... I have placed a fan below the board and one on top to keep the temperature below 40C)
I will give it a try after I have installed a fresh os with the good old HP SAS Expander
 

PigLover

Moderator
Jan 26, 2011
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Perfectly - except the part about linking @ 3Gbps. By the model numbers those are all three 6Gbps drives. Do you know if it is the Marvell controller or the Expander that is limiting them?
 

Kristian

Active Member
Jun 1, 2013
347
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Thats a known issue of this expander. The HP SAS Expander will only negotiate SATA-III harddisks at 3G (SATA300) even though it is capable of 6G (SATA600). It does however negotiate SAS disks at 6G. HP SAS Expander Owner's Thread - [H]ard|Forum

But I think there might be a limit with the marvell, too: But I am not able to test this today.
Just to throw another problem onto the fire: the Marvell ports only support SATA-2 speeds (3 gbps) despite negotiating 6gbps. Peak bandwidth is ~295MB/s. Not a problem w hard drives, but a serious limitation for ssd.
 

Vyacheslav

New Member
Jan 3, 2015
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How many actual owners of this board here? Is everyone have the cold boot problem? I can go around this problem by using 2 * time relays for pressing Reset Button automatically for 1 second after power is ON and system boot. But this is a reserved solution.
 

Ivoni

New Member
Jan 7, 2015
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How many actual owners of this board here? Is everyone have the cold boot problem? I can go around this problem by using 2 * time relays for pressing Reset Button automatically for 1 second after power is ON and system boot. But this is a reserved solution.
I own it. Can't get it to boot off USB even though security is disabled.

So stuck in a dvd. Can't get 2012 R2 or Win 7 to install. Both ask for drivers. Doesn't find the driver it wants on driver disk.

I only have a SSD plugged in. Swapped it out for an old WD green. Same story. Beyond frustrated.
 

Vyacheslav

New Member
Jan 3, 2015
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Do you have the "cold boot" problem?
I try to use bootable Win 7 from RAM usb stick - does not boot at all. But bootable Windows 7 x64 SP1 USB installation media (created with Microsoft tools) allow to install OS to SSD without problems.
 

Ivoni

New Member
Jan 7, 2015
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I couldn't get it to boot off USB at all. In the bios it said I had Security enabled (which it isn't).

I used the MS tools to create both a Win 7 and 2012 R2 USB. Neither worked.