AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 and Windows Powering down HDDs

[Bazinga]

Guys, I see that there are few of you here who use AOC-SAS2LP-MV8. I just got the card and migrated my drives to it. I'm running 2008 R2. What I noticed, is that Windows no longer powers down drives as it used to when they were connected to the MB Sata ports - I have power settings set up to power down drives after 20 minutes of inactivity.

Any ideas? I would appreciate your help!

[Bazinga]

Looks like there is noone who same experience/card. Too bad - my drives keep spinning all the time.

[webs0r]

FWIW I have the AOC-SASLP-MV8, but I'm running it with the SAS2 driver (for 3TB support) on Windows, and spin down works for me.

I'm surprised the SAS2 would not work by design.

Is anything touching your drives regularly? Most SMART monitoring software keeps the drives from idling.

[dasmarx]

Websor, are you sure it is windows that is spinning your drives down? I had no luck spinning my drives down with an intel sasuc8i and an m1015 flashed to lsi 9211 firmware.
The problem is the storport driver (which by default will not be supported by windows with power management features like spindown). It is possible to send spindown commands through sdparm or other programs, but windows will not use any of those.

So i think your driver is not a storport driver, or your saslp-mv8 has some settings about this.

Sdparm website:
http://sg.danny.cz/sg/sdparm.html

At my setup, i made a batch file, which will set a timeout value after each start and let the drives handle the spindown.
There is only one problem. Windows will not know that and one sees pretty long access times because it (windows? ) has to wait for each drive (and will not start all at the same time).

If you are using xbmc or any other media player solution, thats no problem because there is only 1 access on that specific file.

[gorman]

Windows 7 Ultra x64 here, two AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards in my server. Hard drive spin down works fine (Windows settings). Driver for the Marvel controller is 3.1.0.22.

[timotl]

I found this article recently about Idle Power Management in the Storport driver:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff561476(v=vs.85).aspx

You have to edit the inf file for your driver and add the change. This will invalidate the driver signature so you have to force install the driver.
I tried the modification on my 2 LSI cards and now the drives do spin down via the power setting in control panel.
Seems fine so far for me, but vendors may have left this disabled for a good reason.

-timotl

[alexd_uk]

All,

With this card, when your drives are spun down, are you running storage pooling?  If so, do the relevant drives automatically spin up and allow you to access the network shares from the pool correctly (albeit with some lag while the drives spin up)?  Especially interested if anyone is having this working with XBMC clients?

I am using a 3WARE 9650-16ML and control-panel-based drive spin down works fine under Windows 7 64-bit, BUT a couple of the drives will randomly (maybe everything fine for 1 or 2 days but then) not wake up correctly and they 'disappear' from the controller until I do a hard reboot.  I have had to disable drive power down and leave them all spinning otherwise things start going wrong.

Would consider changing controller if other people are having success with this?

Thanks
Alex

[Cassius]

Alex,

I have a 3ware 9650 too and I decided to rebuild my whole system with a AOC-SASLP-MV8 and flexraid. The main reason was that my drives are not the RAID type and for that reason I would frequently have drives not being recognized at boot. I would then have to recover the raid very frequently because of a dropped drive. It never happened, but if more then one drive were dropped during boot... bye bye all data!

I am using mediaportal and drives wake up as they should and as you expected mediaportal freezes for a few moments wainting for the drive to spin.

The 3ware controller is pretty fast but I never felt my data was safe.

[webs0r]

Alexd_uk I can also confirm no drive dropouts with the AOC-SASLP-MV8.

[Cassius]

hummmm

whs is not powering down the drives anymore.

Can anyone tell me if drives are powering down using AOC-SASLP-MV8 and Flexraid update 2 ?

Brahim, was anything changed in this respect from the first release to update 1 or update 2?

[Cassius]

Changed AOC-SASLP-MV8 firmware back to previous version as well as windows driver to no avail.

The only thing I can think of is a change in Flexraid.

Anyone?

[dscline]

Alexd_uk I can also confirm no drive dropouts with the AOC-SASLP-MV8.

I've had drop-outs on the AOC-SASLP-MV8.  I don't believe they were due specifically to the card, I had a drive with some bad sectors, and it seemed that whenever something attempted to write to those sectors, the drive would just drop out.  I haven't had it happen in a long time... that drive has since been replaced, and I may have updated the card's firmware and/or drivers since then.  But I can say that this card doesn't necessarily deal with drive issues as gracefully as it should.  There are other reports of this issue in this long HardForum thread about this card.

[webs0r]

But I can say that this card doesn't necessarily deal with drive issues as gracefully as it should.  There are other reports of this issue in this long HardForum thread about this card.

  Good to know. It was so nearly perfect!

[dscline]

Note however that there are two cards being discussed here:  the AOC-SASLP-MV8, and the AOC-SAS2LP-MV8.  The latter is the newer card, I have the older one.

[Cassius]

dscline,

Do your drives spin down? Which version of firmware and windows drivers are you using? And which version of flexraid are you using?