SOLVED LSI 9305 not detecting HGST 4kn SAS drives

[rigurat]

My LSI 9305 24i is not detecting HGST 4tb 4kn SAS drives. It sees other SAS/SATA drives just fine.

I've done the obligatory pre search, and I found this https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/lsi-hba-sas9305-24i-no-disk-spinup-at-boot.53534/ and https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/60688/Very close to my problem except my drives aren't being detected at the controller card level.

Controller information
------------------------------------------------------------
Controller type : SAS3224
BIOS version : 8.35.00.00
Firmware version : 15.00.00.00
Channel description : 1 Serial Attached SCSI
Initiator ID : 255
Maximum physical devices : 1023
Concurrent commands supported : 5888
Slot : 1
Segment : 0
Bus : 5
Device : 0
Function : 0
RAID Support : No

The motherboard is a Supermicro MBD-X10-SRL-F with latest BIOS.

The card isn't detecting the drives at all. They don't even spin up. Entering the card's BIOS doesn't show the drives even if they are connected, and I have 8 of these. They are connected though Norco 4116 case backplane.

I suspect it may be incompatibility issues, but this controller should be recent enough to handle 4kn drives. Another suspect is the Norco backplane causing problems.

 

[ChriZ]

I was going to suggest you connect the drives directly using a forward breakout cable instead of the sas cable going to the backplane
A quick search, though revealed that this backplane has sata connections. So I assume you are using SFF8643 to sata forward breakout cables (must be a cable mess..)

Anyway, if my search was correct, you must already have the appropriate cables, so an easy troubleshooting step would be to detach a drive from that bay and have it directly connected to the breakout cable. See if the drive is detected now.

 

[rigurat]

I have indeed done that. It turns out it was the backplane causing the problem for some reason only with this particular drive. Connecting the drive directly works fine. Now I'll have to find a new server case.

 

[Ericloewe]

Is it a simple passthrough backplane? If so, my best guess is that the particular drive and backplane connector are just out of tolerance in just the wrong way.

 

[rigurat]

There's some electronics in the backplane. Presumably for the drive activity lights. The Norco website says it supports up to 6 gbps but the backplane says 12 gbps printed on it. Must be a new revision. I'm not understanding why it isn't passing the SAS commands to the new drives. Next potential case will be supermicro.

 

[Ericloewe]

There's some electronics in the backplane.

That doesn't really count (unless they're doing something really nasty which degrades signal quality, but it's unlikely...) - the big difference is the presence of the expander. Without it, the backplane is little more than a fancy cable-replacement solution.

 

[rigurat]

While the backplane doesn't seem to be plain pass through, there are some electronics in between, I'm certain the Norco backplane has no expander in it. It's strange as it works with all the other drives, just these particular drives it doesn't detect.