Question About the Intermittent Recognition of ASM1166 M.2-to-SATA Expansion Card
Question About the Intermittent Recognition of ASM1166 M.2-to-SATA Expansion Card
Hi All,
I’m seeking some advice regarding my current situation.
I’m using an HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini with an M.2-to-6x SATA expansion card that includes an ASM1166 chip. There are six 2TB WD Green HDDs connected to it, and these drives are powered externally via a PSU.
I’m not attempting to boot from the HDDs; instead, I have a 2TB Samsung 870 Evo SSD with Proxmox installed. Booting into the OS works fine.
The problem lies with the occasional recognition of the ASM166 chip. During startup, if I enter BIOS and adjust any settings (even just the boot delay), the chip is detected and I can access the drives normally. But when I simply perform a standard boot without entering BIOS (and making any changes), the chip and drives fail to appear.
After extensive online research, I found a firmware update for the ASM1166 chip on certain Intel chipsets—my motherboard doesn’t use that one, so I applied it myself, but it didn’t help.
I’m not very experienced with boot configurations, but could there be a difference in how the system behaves during a regular boot versus after a BIOS update? I have a side-by-side comparison of the boot logs from dmesg, though it’s not giving clear insights, and I might be sharing too much.
I’m uncertain if I’m on the right track, but any guidance would be greatly appreciated. I’m ready to troubleshoot further and welcome suggestions.
The external PSU's on/off control is aligned with the PC's power supply. A notable variation is that during a reset—such as when adjusting BIOS settings—the HDDs might stay powered, whereas a cold start could delay their activation, requiring them to spin up first. It's unclear how this timing difference affects performance if the HDDs take longer to activate compared to the ASM1166. To verify, the external PSU could be activated before the PC starts, ensuring the HDDs are fully powered before any other components engage.
This is the beginning of the setup I’m using…
The power supply is kept active all the time… I’ve connected the 24-pin connector to a Raspberry Pi that controls the ground for the PS_ON signal. It handles the boot processes for the entire server using shell commands. To test, I simply leave the PSU on and connect to the MiniDesk through MeshCommander.