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Next up: Struggles getting my HBA to see SAS drives (don't think it's 3.3v or 512 vs 520). What should I try? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by nemanin@lemmy.world to c/homelab@lemmy.ml

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16636012

Me again, back with another probably dumb question, but you beautiful bastards have been so helpful so far, I can't stay away!

I got 10x 10TB SAS drives from FB market place. They look like they're in good shape and the guy says he pulled them from the live server of a family member who passed. HGST. most/all are 2018.

I brought them home and tried to mount them one-by-one in an xpenology VM to smart test them (easiest place I had set up for SMART tests).

But most of my troubleshooting has just involved looking at the HBA menus in BIOS and seeing if the drives even show up. Currently only 1 seems to reliably.

and I got a weird mix of drive showing up fine, but others not showing up at all. I also got a couple drives that passed a SMART test, then when I pulled them and tried to remount them later, they don't even show up?

I tried using molex to SATA power adapters to rule out 3.3v, didn't help.

I don't think it's formatting because some of them mounted at least once and they all came from the same server.

I tried putting the HBA in another PCIe slot, plan to try the third slot tonight.

I have this HBA, confirmed in BIOS it's in IT mode: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BYZBNXBS/

(I'm having troubles finding a good manual for this board, by the way. there are flashing LEDs that may be trying to tell me something?)

and these breakout cables: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07B9SBSVW/

I might try another HBA, rule out bad board. I plan to try the third PCIe slot tonight, try to rule that out...

What else?

They could be just bad drives, but the seller seemed genuine and they look like they're in good shape. He even pinged me after the sale to see how they worked out for me.. doesn't seem like a scammer.

Also, a couple questions: 1) these should be hot-swappable, right? and 2) what would happen if this PCIe x8 card is in a PICE x4 slot?

Thanks again. You guys have been great! :)

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[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You won't see Drives from an hba, in your bios. Those drives aren't plugged into a controller managed by your bios.

Do you see them if you boot into Linux and run lshw, or if you go into the bios for the controller card?

If you don't get prompted or see the controller bios loading, you may need to enable something like "option Rom" in your normal bios.

[–] nemanin@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

On the 9300-16i, I have been seeing the connected drives under a ‘physical drives’ menu that appears if drives are connected… on the 9305 I did not…

Would you expect the drives to spin up on boot?

I’ll try booting into proxmox and running lshw on both cards tomorrow. Thanks for the route to test!

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 3 points 5 months ago

Also just to be clear, everything in the sata section of your motherboard bios is irrelevant unless you're using onboard ports for something

If everything is in the hba, you could turn off sata on your mobo if you wanted.

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 months ago

Not necessarily spin up, no. My experience with lsi cards is they don't spin up the disks until the card is initialized.

If your mobo bios isn't loading the card bios right after post and before os loading, the disks might not spin up until a driver is loaded.

I always enable the bios on mine so I'm not 100% on this, but I think this is correct.

[–] nemanin@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

Ok. Did a bunch more testing here tonight.

I have 2x 8tb SAS drives that have worked for several weeks now. Those show up in bios reliably regardless of which connector I use. So I think the HBA is working and the cables are good.

Of the 10x 10tb drives, 1 drive shows up reliably. It also seems to work on any connector I use. But it is the only drive the works.

Here is 8 of the 10 installed and only one showing in BIOS. I think the other 7 are not even spinning up.

An additional weird thing is that at least 1 other of the 10 drives did show up the first time I plugged it in from inside the xpenology VM. I did 'hot swap' that one in, but it then passed a SMART test. But since it passing the test and me pulling it, it hasn't worked again. I'm also not positive which drive it is because originally I wasn't expecting things to behave so weirdly, so I didn't start taking notes...

As another test, I got a hold of a 9305-16i to see if the drives would read on that. And while that card would show up in BIOS, none of the drives -- including the 8th that have always worked -- showed up or spun up at all! I wonder if that card is not compatible with my mobo?

Is it possible other BIOS settings are interfering?