Multiple Br10i/lsi1068e in one system?

[Romey-Rome]

[RESOLVED(ish)] Multiple Br10i/lsi1068e in one system?

Has anyone had any luck running two lsi1068e based (Br10i in particular) cards on one motherboard?

My Intel BX38BT will only recognize one at a time. I've tried various FW/BIOS from various vendors with no luck.

My mobo has 3 PCIe slots. 2 x16, and one x4. I have my video card in the x4 slot, and the 2 SAS cards in the x16 slots. The bios shows both of the x16 slots negotiated to x8, so it sees the card, but only one shows up during post and detects drives. Disabling boot rom on them makes no difference. If it's enabled, it'll only scan the first controller (HAB0, the one with the lower PCI ID) and ignore the second one. Swapping slots around with video card makes no difference.

One clue I found in the mobo manual is:
Desktop Board DX38BT provides the following expansion capability:
• Two PCI Express 2.0 x16 ports
• One PCI Express 1.1 x4 port (routed to a x16 connector)

Which leads me to believe that maybe I can only use 2 PCIe slots at a time? But if I put my Dell Perc5/i (lsi1068 chipset) in, then both show up, which kind of throws that theory out the window.

Nonetheless, I'm going to try to pick up a PCI video card & see what happens. I don't have another dual PCIe board to test on at the moment.

Sidenote: I have to put the cards in a different machine to access the setup BIOS. On mine it says entering setup, then just bypasses it. I've read that on some boards you have to invoke the one time boot screen to be able to get into the SAS BIOS, but that has done nothing for me.

Any way, thanks in advance for any feedback.

EDIT: Not likely to matter, but I'm running CentOS 6, and lspci only shows one SAS card. No mptsas/SCSI errors in dmesg.

 

[Romey-Rome]

Well, no dice with PCI video. I did have an opportunity to try them out on another mobo, and both cards seem to initialize. So something with that board and those cards...

 

[Romey-Rome]

So I got them both to work with one in PCIe x16(at x8), and one in PCIe x4. Now curious about any performance hit (probably none), as my array will be spanning both cards.

Can't use PCIe video though. Drops me back to one SAS card.

 

[Patrick]

Very strange. I have had multiple LSI cards in X58 boards.

 

[Romey-Rome]

Yeh. I really like the Intel boards, but their dumbed down BIOS really pisses me off.

 

[RimBlock]

I have had a nightmare trying to get two of these cards running in one board.

I had quite a bit of trouble finding a 775 board with two PCIe slots but finally found an Intel X58 server board. Bought it and a 8400GS (IIRC) PCI video card and put it all together. Would only work with one controller and a PCIe video card. Turns out that model of board has an issue with that model of PCI card.....

Bought an Asus P8H67 board with an i3 2100 and it all worked great until I put Linux on it and ofund it was disabling my Intel NIC and sometimes one of my controllers resulting on 3MB/s over the network which for a NAS is not so good. Bug reported in the Linux Kernel bugzilla and it seems others have the same issue. Put WHS 2011 on it and it ran fine.

Finally bought an ASRock Extreme 4 Z68 board with two PCIe x16 and one PCIe x8 slot as I wanted to put ESXi on the box and use the extra RAM (16GB installed but WHS2011 limited to 8GB) for other VMs. This was one of the very few motherboards I could find someone had confirmed the VT-d instructions worked with. The controllers would only work in the PCIe x4 slot. I then got two IBM M1015 controllers and flashed to the LSI 9211 IT firmware (took having to try 4 different motherboards before the flashing worked) and they run fantastically.

I suspect there is something with the 1068 based boards PCIe 1.0e spec which newer PCIe 2.0 boards don't like. Stay away from Linux and the Asus P8H67 works fine and has onboard video with the i3/i5/i7 processors.

RB

 

[emc]

I have used 2 (&3) BR10is in both a Asus P8b WS & Tyan S5510 without issues. All cards flashed to LSI IT firmware. Desktop boards seem to be hit or miss with the 1068 based cards. I have an Intel 965 based MB that would not POST with a 1068e card installed in the x16 slot. But an old Via based 775 board worked fine.