Problem installing second drive in XG-1541

zatco

Hi,

I have an XG-1541 with an M2 drive that has the main OS, but would like to install a 480 gb SATA drive as a cache drive for Squid.

I have installed two different drives, but it does not detect it in the BIOS or OS level. I have even formatted the drive with Linux and Windows file system but it still does not detect.

Is there anything specific in the BIOS or on the motherboard that I need to enable to get it to detect the SATA drive?

stephenw10

There's nothing special about the SATA connections there. As long as the drive is compatible and powered it should show up in the BIOS. It doesn't matter how it's formatted at that level.

I will say that pfSense has not way to manage dual drives like that included so you would need to script something or just reinstall to the SATA drive.
Also that a Squid cache that large won't really help in any meaningful way.

Steve

zatco

@stephenw10 Thank you for the reply. I have tried several drives and it does not detect where as on my previous XG-1540 it showed up with no issue.

I will keep digging and see what I can find.

zatco

@stephenw10 I did manage to get it to detect the SATA drive, but I had to take the M.2 out of the box. Is there a specific setting I need to set in the bios for it to detect multiple hard drives?

stephenw10

Hmm, it's possible one of the SATA channels is shared between the m.2 and one of the SATA sockets. Though I have never seen that before. Did you try the drive in more than one? Were you still able to boot from m.2 when the SATA drive was connected?

zatco

@stephenw10 Sorry for the late response. Been working on other projects and can now get back to this one.

I have tried multiple drives, including an active drive in my older XG-1540 that has no problem detecting a second drive.

I even went through the process of booting both up and comparing both bios settings on the XG-1540 and XG-1541 to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

Tested the all the drives with a toaster to make sure they function and they do.

Im almost at a loss now and about to just say it doesn't work. Any other suggestions would be great.

stephenw10

Did you try multiple SATA ports on the board though?

I've never seen this issue before but almost all users who make this change simply replace the m.2 drive entirely.

The board manual doesn't give any solid information that might fit this but it does say two things:

There are six SATA 3.0 ports on the motherboard. These ports provide serial-link
signal connections, which are faster than the connections of Parallel ATA. I-SATA0
also supports SuperDOM, Supermicro proprietary SATA DOM with built-in power
connection on pin 8.

So I would avoid using I-SATA0.

The M.2 is mux with I-SATA port for legacy SATA SSD devices.

Which implies it might share the SATA lines with one of the I-SATA ports. Unhelpfully it doesn't say which!

Steve

zatco

@stephenw10 Looks like that was the issue was the SATA port. There was 1 oraange SATA port which was what the cable was connected to, and 5 blue ports.

I moved the SATA cable from the orange one to one of the Blue ones and it now detects the hard drive.

stephenw10

Ah, good result!