LSI 9211-8i issue detecting specific set of disks.
I have a set of 4 identical drives that the 9211-8i refuses to detect in IT and BIOS mode.
The drives are detected correctly when connected to a HP SAS Expander (albeit at SATA1 speed) connected to the 9211-8i and are also detected correctly on the mainboard SATA ports At SATA 6G.
I'm suspecting a link speed negotiation issue.
The SAS Expander is on the old bios that only supported SATA1 speeds, so it forces all drives to run SATA1.
I switched around cables to see if I had bad cables, but other drives work perfectly from the same cables that these drives are not detected on.
Anyone have an idea if I could force the 9211-8i to default to SATA1 for now? Or any other suggestions in how to get it to detect these drives?
The controller is on P20.
Posted Apr 3, 2017, 7:31 AM UTC
When you tested the drives with the expander and the mainboard, did you test them individually or all at the same time? My spidey sense is maybe there isn't enough power to run all the drives at once and the LSI is fine.
Also, does p20 match up with the version of the kernel you're using? I don't have the link handy but there's a page with a chart of which firmware works with which kernel.
The expander was in the same system. So if anything, without it there is more power.
And yes, I tested every disk individually and as a set, in the same system on all 3 hosts busses by just switching cables around.
The disks used to be on the SAS Expander, which I'm looking to remove because I replaced 16 500GB disks that were attached to it with 4 new biguns.
So, there's less drives in it then there was before, newer ones too, so less power hungry.
I've googled a post about a similar issue where the person had to play around with jumpers on the drives, going to check if there's something to do with jumpers on these drives and if I can fix anything.
Any more suggestions are welcome!
And here's that link about the drivers/kernel:
https://roycebits.blogspot.com/2015/01/freebsd-lsi-sas9211-8i-hba-firmware.html
Scroll down to the section "Known FreeBSD versions and their equivalent target mps driver versions"
This isn't a driver/firmware issue, especially since he's running p20.
Nerfing the drives totally defeats the purpose of running them through any expander.
Have you tried looking into updating the backplane expander firmware?
Have you tried any other types of disks?
When troubleshooting an issue, anything goes and nothing ruins confirming the suspected cause.
Nerfing the drives neg speed is only to confirm that these drives aren't detected by the 9211 when direct connected because it sets them to 6Gbps and then fails to detect them, while they are detected alright by the same 9211 when the drives are on the expander, because the expander forces them to 1.5Gbps.
And that is what I did, for some reason these Hitachi drives go into 6Gbps mode which causes the 9211 to fail to detect them (this with rather premium cables and the same drives working at 6Gbps on several other cards without issues).
Now that I know what the issue is, I have retired these drives and removed the expander as planned.
With that, anyone want to buy a HP SAS Expander? It's the correct PCB to be flashed to the current firmwares (that negs up to 6Gbps for SAS and 3Gbps for SATA).