Hello everyone,
Hope I'm posting in the right place, as I was literally pulling my hair on this dilemma and really hope someone could point me to the right direction...
-------Lengthy post alert...----------
Bought an OWC Thunderbay Flex 8 last year and been using their SoftRaid, with a RAID5 8x8TB setup. Also built a new PC with Asus H670-Pro WiFi D4 and ThunderboltEX 4 adapter, to support this enclosure. I'm aware that 8 bays on a RAID5 is pretty alarming but the Windows version only supports RAID 1/0/5 even till now.
Fast forward to last month, I finally pulled the trigger and bought an LSI Megaraid 9271-8i card, since this enclosure has spare PCIE slots that can be tunneled via Thunderbolt. Hoping to turn this enclosure into a hardware-raid system (which is under their advertisement).
That's when the nightmare begins. For the life of me, I just couldn't get the card to be detected at all in Windows (10/11). Even though I've managed to boot into the ROM BIOS and set up the raid and everything, the Windows Device Manager just doesn't see it at all. I even took the card out and installed it directly into my PC's motherboard, to replace the thunderbolt adapter, still no luck.
From my research, this is a pretty old card that the latest driver and firmware stopped around 2016 or so. Alright, returned it.
This month, I got a Megaraid 9362-8i (set up a RAID10), which supposedly has newer support. This time, it'd get detected in Windows, if it's directly installed on the motherboard, but not in the thunderbolt enclosure.
Alright, gotta be something with the thunderbolt PCIE tunneling I suppose, progress!
Then I started fiddling around with the motherboard's thunderbolt-related settings in the BIOS, e.g. Discrete Thunderbolt Support, DTBT Controller Configuration, Control IOMMU Pre-boot Behavior, etc. Toggling everything I could and check if it makes it better.
On one instance, I accidentally discovered, that after a period of time after booting to Windows, the enclosure would turn to Standby mode (as it's not being detected/used for a while I guess). But if I open the Device Manager and Scan for hardware changes, all of the sudden, it'd "wake up" the card/enclosure and it shows up in the Device Manager finally!
However, it comes with big caveats, as it'd only work after each fresh reboot of Windows (and not 100% for some reason); the Raid volume shows as a "removable storage", and I'd have to change the Removal Policy in the Device Manager every time to make it "Better performance";
Last and the biggest caveat is, probably due to it's detected after booting, neither MegaRAID Storage Manager, nor the LSA software would find the controller host. So there's no way to monitor the raid while using it.
At this point, I was almost certain that it has something to do with the Thunderbolt PCIE tunneling. But for the life of me, I couldn't find the right settings/tweak (if there's one). Funny thing is, I have a 10G PCIE ethernet card installed in the enclosure, and it works perfectly regardless when I connect the enclosure to the PC. Of course I've swapped the PCIE slots of the 10G card and the Megarad, just to rule out factors.
I even tried a Virtual Machine just to see if virtual tunneling via IOMMU does anything, but I've already reached my knowledge/limit on this.
Wondering if anyone can share some insight or should I just give up and go back to SoftRAID with RAID5?
Summary of specs:
Windows 11 Pro
i7-12900KF
Asus H670-Pro WiFi D4
128GB DDR4
ThunderboltEX 4 add-on
OWC Thunderbay Flex 8, 8x8TB HDD
Avago/LSI Megaraid 9362-8i
Little background: I do video editing and currently have a customized PC, plus a MacBook Air M2. The thing I'm looking for in a storage system, is fast and reliable and relatively easy to maintain. Judging by my experience so far however, such thing is hard to nail down. I work mostly in Windows, with often tap in macOS, but very limited knowledge/experience on Linux.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Hope I'm posting in the right place, as I was literally pulling my hair on this dilemma and really hope someone could point me to the right direction...
-------Lengthy post alert...----------
Bought an OWC Thunderbay Flex 8 last year and been using their SoftRaid, with a RAID5 8x8TB setup. Also built a new PC with Asus H670-Pro WiFi D4 and ThunderboltEX 4 adapter, to support this enclosure. I'm aware that 8 bays on a RAID5 is pretty alarming but the Windows version only supports RAID 1/0/5 even till now.
Fast forward to last month, I finally pulled the trigger and bought an LSI Megaraid 9271-8i card, since this enclosure has spare PCIE slots that can be tunneled via Thunderbolt. Hoping to turn this enclosure into a hardware-raid system (which is under their advertisement).
That's when the nightmare begins. For the life of me, I just couldn't get the card to be detected at all in Windows (10/11). Even though I've managed to boot into the ROM BIOS and set up the raid and everything, the Windows Device Manager just doesn't see it at all. I even took the card out and installed it directly into my PC's motherboard, to replace the thunderbolt adapter, still no luck.
From my research, this is a pretty old card that the latest driver and firmware stopped around 2016 or so. Alright, returned it.
This month, I got a Megaraid 9362-8i (set up a RAID10), which supposedly has newer support. This time, it'd get detected in Windows, if it's directly installed on the motherboard, but not in the thunderbolt enclosure.
Alright, gotta be something with the thunderbolt PCIE tunneling I suppose, progress!
Then I started fiddling around with the motherboard's thunderbolt-related settings in the BIOS, e.g. Discrete Thunderbolt Support, DTBT Controller Configuration, Control IOMMU Pre-boot Behavior, etc. Toggling everything I could and check if it makes it better.
On one instance, I accidentally discovered, that after a period of time after booting to Windows, the enclosure would turn to Standby mode (as it's not being detected/used for a while I guess). But if I open the Device Manager and Scan for hardware changes, all of the sudden, it'd "wake up" the card/enclosure and it shows up in the Device Manager finally!
However, it comes with big caveats, as it'd only work after each fresh reboot of Windows (and not 100% for some reason); the Raid volume shows as a "removable storage", and I'd have to change the Removal Policy in the Device Manager every time to make it "Better performance";
Last and the biggest caveat is, probably due to it's detected after booting, neither MegaRAID Storage Manager, nor the LSA software would find the controller host. So there's no way to monitor the raid while using it.
At this point, I was almost certain that it has something to do with the Thunderbolt PCIE tunneling. But for the life of me, I couldn't find the right settings/tweak (if there's one). Funny thing is, I have a 10G PCIE ethernet card installed in the enclosure, and it works perfectly regardless when I connect the enclosure to the PC. Of course I've swapped the PCIE slots of the 10G card and the Megarad, just to rule out factors.
I even tried a Virtual Machine just to see if virtual tunneling via IOMMU does anything, but I've already reached my knowledge/limit on this.
Wondering if anyone can share some insight or should I just give up and go back to SoftRAID with RAID5?
Summary of specs:
Windows 11 Pro
i7-12900KF
Asus H670-Pro WiFi D4
128GB DDR4
ThunderboltEX 4 add-on
OWC Thunderbay Flex 8, 8x8TB HDD
Avago/LSI Megaraid 9362-8i
Little background: I do video editing and currently have a customized PC, plus a MacBook Air M2. The thing I'm looking for in a storage system, is fast and reliable and relatively easy to maintain. Judging by my experience so far however, such thing is hard to nail down. I work mostly in Windows, with often tap in macOS, but very limited knowledge/experience on Linux.
Thanks in advance for your help!