Question Intermittent recognition of ASM1166 M.2-to-SATA Expansion Card ?

[FarvaFarva]

Hi All,

Wondering if anybody has any thoughts on my predicament.

I've got an HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini, with an M.2-to- 6x SATA Expansion Card which has an ASM1166 chip, with 6x 2TB WD Green HDDs connected to it. The drives are powered externally by a PSU.

I'm not trying to boot from the HDDs, I have a 2TB Samsung 870 Evo SSD which has Proxmox loaded onto it. Booting to the OS is no problem.

The issue is an intermittent recognition of the ASM166 chip. During the boot cycle, if I boot to BIOS and change any of the settings (seriously, I can update the boot delay setting only) within the BIOS, on the restart the chip is recognized and I can use/interact with the attached drives normally. However, when I just do a regular boot cycle without booting into the BIOS (and changing a setting), the chip (and the drives) are not recognized.

Through hours of internet research, there is a firmware update for the ASM1166 chip for select Intel chipsets (of which, my Motherboard does not utilize) which I performed as well but to no avail.

I'm not super familiar with boot settings, but is there a difference in boot cycles between when an update of BIOS settings occurs and not? I've got a side by side comparison of the boot log from dmesg which, isn't telling me much because honestly I don't know what I'm looking at. I can share that as well, but might be asking a lot.

Not sure if I'm going down the right path thinking its the boot cycles but... any help would be appreciated. Happy to troubleshoot myself, if people can point me in the right direction.

 

[jokkydee]

How is the external PSU on/off control synchronised with the power of the PC? One difference that comes to mind is potentially in one case the HDDs remain powered on (i.e. during a reset, which happens when you change BIOS settings), whereas a cold start could mean the HDDs are coming up a bit later - i.e. they are powered and then need to spin up. I'm not sure what impact it would have if the HDDs come up a bit later than when the ASM1166 does. Perhaps to check this you could have the external PSU turn on before the PC is turned on, to make sure the HDD are well and truly powered on first before anything else comes up.

 

[FarvaFarva]

How is the external PSU on/off control synchronised with the power of the PC? One difference that comes to mind is potentially in one case the HDDs remain powered on (i.e. during a reset, which happens when you change BIOS settings), whereas a cold start could mean the HDDs are coming up a bit later - i.e. they are powered and then need to spin up. I'm not sure what impact it would have if the HDDs come up a bit later than when the ASM1166 does. Perhaps to check this you could have the external PSU turn on before the PC is turned on, to make sure the HDD are well and truly powered on first before anything else comes up.

So this is the start of the jank setup that I have…

Basically the PSU is always powered on… I’ve got the 24pin connector wired to a raspberry pi which manages the ground for the PS_ON trigger. Runs the boot cycles for the whole server via shell commands. For testing this tho, I just leave the PSU powered on always and interface with the MiniDesk via MeshCommander.