2 hours ago
Hi everyone,
I’ve been using Linux Lite for about two years now on a variety of older machines. I absolutely love how it breathes life into hardware that Windows has long since abandoned. Recently, I decided to take an old mid-tower desktop that was sitting in my closet and turn it into a dedicated, low-power storage node for my home network. Since Linux Lite is so lightweight, it seemed like the perfect OS to keep resources focused on data throughput rather than desktop fluff.
However, I’ve run into a bit of a technical "rabbit hole" that I’m hoping someone here might have navigated before. To get the storage capacity I need, I’ve installed a dedicated HBA (Host Bus Adapter) card along with a PCI-E expander card. My goal was to bypass the limited onboard SATA ports and run a larger array of mechanical drives for a redundant backup system.
The specific point that's tripping me up is how the current kernel in Linux Lite 6.x is negotiating the handshake with the PCI-E expander. When I boot up, the HBA itself is recognized immediately in the terminal via lspci, but the drives connected through the expander card are acting very sporadically. Sometimes they show up in GParted, and other times they just don’t initialize at all during the mount process. I've read in some older documentation that certain power-management features in the kernel can sometimes conflict with "enterprise-grade" controllers when they're used in consumer-grade motherboards.
I’ve always been a bit of a "janky tech" enthusiast—there’s a certain satisfaction in making high-end server gear work in a repurposed office PC—but this one has me stumped. I’ve already tried disabling the "Link Power Management" in the BIOS, thinking it was a power-state issue, but the inconsistency remains. It’s frustrating because when it does work, the speeds are fantastic, but I can't rely on a storage box that might lose half its drives after a simple reboot.
I’m curious if anyone else in the community has experimented with HBA controllers or PCI-E expansion hardware on Lite. Do you think I should be looking into a specific kernel header or perhaps a manual tweak to the GRUB parameters to ensure these cards initialize properly every time?
Has anyone noticed if newer versions of Linux Lite have changed the way they handle high-latency PCI-E handshakes compared to the older 5.x releases?
I’ve been using Linux Lite for about two years now on a variety of older machines. I absolutely love how it breathes life into hardware that Windows has long since abandoned. Recently, I decided to take an old mid-tower desktop that was sitting in my closet and turn it into a dedicated, low-power storage node for my home network. Since Linux Lite is so lightweight, it seemed like the perfect OS to keep resources focused on data throughput rather than desktop fluff.
However, I’ve run into a bit of a technical "rabbit hole" that I’m hoping someone here might have navigated before. To get the storage capacity I need, I’ve installed a dedicated HBA (Host Bus Adapter) card along with a PCI-E expander card. My goal was to bypass the limited onboard SATA ports and run a larger array of mechanical drives for a redundant backup system.
The specific point that's tripping me up is how the current kernel in Linux Lite 6.x is negotiating the handshake with the PCI-E expander. When I boot up, the HBA itself is recognized immediately in the terminal via lspci, but the drives connected through the expander card are acting very sporadically. Sometimes they show up in GParted, and other times they just don’t initialize at all during the mount process. I've read in some older documentation that certain power-management features in the kernel can sometimes conflict with "enterprise-grade" controllers when they're used in consumer-grade motherboards.
I’ve always been a bit of a "janky tech" enthusiast—there’s a certain satisfaction in making high-end server gear work in a repurposed office PC—but this one has me stumped. I’ve already tried disabling the "Link Power Management" in the BIOS, thinking it was a power-state issue, but the inconsistency remains. It’s frustrating because when it does work, the speeds are fantastic, but I can't rely on a storage box that might lose half its drives after a simple reboot.
I’m curious if anyone else in the community has experimented with HBA controllers or PCI-E expansion hardware on Lite. Do you think I should be looking into a specific kernel header or perhaps a manual tweak to the GRUB parameters to ensure these cards initialize properly every time?
Has anyone noticed if newer versions of Linux Lite have changed the way they handle high-latency PCI-E handshakes compared to the older 5.x releases?