Howdy all,
I found this forum searching for info on this card and I'm glad I did, great resource. I've heard good things about this card and have access to as as many as I need at a great cost so I really want them to work. Picked one up and started testing on my FreeNAS systems. Drivers preloaded in the OS, check. All drives are showing up, check. Pools created and tested, check. Next a reboot to drop into the bios to poke around. AT this point I'm testing on MIS Mini ITX boards, E350IA-E45 to be exact. These boards boot up fast so the first time around I missed an error which I'm still not sure is being thrown by the mainboard or the controller. The error is:
"ERROR: Could not enable PCI IO attributes"
I hit CTRL-C when prompted for the BIOS UI and I get a message that says it will start once the board initializes. I get a flash of info about connected drives then it looks as the mainboard resets and then FreeNAS starts to boot. It never goes in the card UI. I disable all other boot devices and repeat which then allows me to access the card UI. None of this seems to be effecting the card to work with FreeNAS but an error is an error and having to disable boot devices in order to access the UI just seems wrong. I browsed the card UI for info on interrupt settings or anything else I might be able to modify but it tells me everything is set by the mainboard which is how it should be. Check the mainboard bios looking for settings to muck with for the PCI bus, nothing really there. The 16X PCIE slot on the board actually runs at 4X speed which shouldn't matter because the card is 4X and i've run 8X cards in the slot with no issue either.
The card came with firmware version 6.26.00.00 . I've made no attempt to upgrade the bios yet because I'm just not clear with the large amount of info about how newer bios's like the IT bios and what it will do with my application, FreeNAS. Using mainly ZFS I need the drive to support JBOD operation. I know that firmware updates can make all the difference with issues but I wanted to bounce it off you guys and hopefully Patrick who seems to have a large amount of experiences with this card.
Thanks in advance,
~NC
I found this forum searching for info on this card and I'm glad I did, great resource. I've heard good things about this card and have access to as as many as I need at a great cost so I really want them to work. Picked one up and started testing on my FreeNAS systems. Drivers preloaded in the OS, check. All drives are showing up, check. Pools created and tested, check. Next a reboot to drop into the bios to poke around. AT this point I'm testing on MIS Mini ITX boards, E350IA-E45 to be exact. These boards boot up fast so the first time around I missed an error which I'm still not sure is being thrown by the mainboard or the controller. The error is:
"ERROR: Could not enable PCI IO attributes"
I hit CTRL-C when prompted for the BIOS UI and I get a message that says it will start once the board initializes. I get a flash of info about connected drives then it looks as the mainboard resets and then FreeNAS starts to boot. It never goes in the card UI. I disable all other boot devices and repeat which then allows me to access the card UI. None of this seems to be effecting the card to work with FreeNAS but an error is an error and having to disable boot devices in order to access the UI just seems wrong. I browsed the card UI for info on interrupt settings or anything else I might be able to modify but it tells me everything is set by the mainboard which is how it should be. Check the mainboard bios looking for settings to muck with for the PCI bus, nothing really there. The 16X PCIE slot on the board actually runs at 4X speed which shouldn't matter because the card is 4X and i've run 8X cards in the slot with no issue either.
The card came with firmware version 6.26.00.00 . I've made no attempt to upgrade the bios yet because I'm just not clear with the large amount of info about how newer bios's like the IT bios and what it will do with my application, FreeNAS. Using mainly ZFS I need the drive to support JBOD operation. I know that firmware updates can make all the difference with issues but I wanted to bounce it off you guys and hopefully Patrick who seems to have a large amount of experiences with this card.
Thanks in advance,
~NC