Devices under control of stornvme timeout and after reset don't recover

[Stancey]

I am running 3 Plextor NVMe M8Pe(Y) 4X devices 1TB in size configured as one volume using spanned devices. I am trying to offload the device to a rotating storage device. It runs anywhere from 1 hour to 6 hours and then I get stornvme into the picture to reset the device and at that point it drops out. One of the devices are installed on the root bus and the other two are on a port with a bridge. It almost looks like stornvme is resetting the bus to shut down the I/O operations and whacking the other device on the bridge but not restoring the configuration space for that one. It takes a reboot of the workstation system to get the device back on line again.
Is anyone familiar with the operation of stornvme that could explain what it is doing? I have a lot of experience with PCIe Reset from dealing with it on Linux systems in my former job and it looks like a clear is being done at the wrong level of the Bus layers and the config is not being restored properly. I have also seen some "Surprise down" errors reported in the event log which means that a device was taken off the bus without the proper suppress bits for power loss errors due to MC control functions.

Thank you in advance.

 

[Saltgrass]

Well, I am not really familiar with what you are stating you are trying to do, so maybe a couple of questions and clarifications.

You are using 3 PCIe M.2 drives in a RAID configuration or storage spaces? You are running one of the drives as PCIe and the other two as SATA?

I don't know of many systems which have three M.2 slots, so is the "Rotating" device and external NAS of some type? Does the "Rotating" device have a model number?

If you are using a Windows NVMe driver, does Plextor have its own driver for the device/s?

 

[Stancey]

Well, I am not really familiar with what you are stating you are trying to do, so maybe a couple of questions and clarifications.

You are using 3 PCIe M.2 drives in a RAID configuration or storage spaces? You are running one of the drives as PCIe and the other two as SATA?

I don't know of many systems which have three M.2 slots, so is the "Rotating" device and external NAS of some type? Does the "Rotating" device have a model number?

If you are using a Windows NVMe driver, does Plextor have its own driver for the device/s?

No, not M2 . That is the first thing everyone thinks of. The M8Pe(Y) is a PCIe NVMe device (just like any HBA) that plugs into a PCIe X4 Slot and takes commands over the bus, effectively an NVM extended memory device but much larger and more lanes than an M.2. Intel makes a similar device called an "Optane" which I have also been working with The resulting drive is treated as a SATA or SCSI drive. by the software behind the stornvme driver.

The target Rotating drive is a conventional USB or eSATA connected device in an external case.

My problem seems to be that the stornvme driver doesn't do things I would expect from a driver talking to a PCIe card. I have had a lot of experience dealing with PCI and PCIe devices using expansion rack devices that had transparent and non-transparent bridges on them so I understand a few things about the effects of resetting the connected devices to clear them before the reset is done. Only my experience was with Linux systems, not windows. Hardware is hardware, Software can work around a lot of things that is wrong in hardware but it can also do things that make the hardware act abnormally.

 

[Stancey]

BTW the platform I am using is a Gigabyte Designaire Rev-1 X-99 motherboard that is about 2 years old on the latest (F5C) BIOS. I have had a love/hate relationship with the Designaire but I do understand its capablilities. The Driver file is MIcrosoft's default 'stornvme' and is dated November 2018. I am running a current, as of Friday, Insider build.

 

[Saltgrass]

It seems the device is a substitute PCIe NVMe drive and is a little slower than my M.2 drive. Intel Optane memory is used to accelerate an HDD like the small SSDs they used on prior systems, so I don't see the similarities.

Since I have no experience with the device, I can only make a couple of comments. Are there any other devices sharing resources for the PCIe slot?

Does the time it normally fails relate to the time set to put drives to sleep? I have my new Desktop which keeps disconnecting a 2.5 inch SATA drive which seems to be related to that setting.

Any firmware updates for that device? Since you are in the Insiders program, it might just be that version is missing something your device needs, in the current build.

Good luck with it ..

 

[Stancey]

I don't believe it is slower than an M.2 because it has 4 lanes versus the 2 on an M.2. The reason for selecting the device was simply raw capacity availability. I am dealing with the processing of images and want to stage multiple terabytes of data (2-3) on the device. Can't do that on an M.2 for obvious reasons.