RedBear
Explorer
- Joined
- May 16, 2015
- Messages
- 53
So I've got this new ThinkServer TS440 (YUX, the one with eight 3.5" drive bays built-in). I put an old 500GB SATA drive I had just pulled from an Apple Time Capsule in one of the bays and it was detected just fine, as displayed during the little boot-up BIOS dialog. Worked fine too, I installed Elementary OS Freya on it as a test. That was with the built-in LSI 9240-8i "RAID500" card.
Just to see if it was possible, I tried to cross-flash the built-in LSI 9240-8i card to IT mode. No DOS or EFI flashing utilities would even acknowledge that any LSI card was present in the machine with the RAID500 installed. I went ahead and replaced it with an IBM ServeRaid M1015 from eBay that was pre-flashed to Phase 19 firmware, IT mode (with the BIOS ROM still installed).
Since this will be my first FreeNAS system I had ordered 10 of the smallest, cheapest decent SATA drives I could find for use as a test-bed / playground so I can make all my initial mistakes on what are basically throwaway drives. They're 120GB Seagate SATA drives that were only about $15 apiece. I went ahead and filled up the remaining 7 hard drive bays once the requisite drive caddies arrived, leaving the 500GB drive installed. Then I booted up FreeNAS, connected to it and did the initial configuration, and tried to create a ZFS volume.
At this point I was surprised to note that the only disk FreeNAS seemed to be seeing was the 500GB drive I had initially installed. No other disks were visible in the GUI. I was all like, "WTF? Did I just waste $150 on SATA drives that are too old to be compatible with the M1015?" But then I was like, "Nah, SATA connections are all backwards compatible back to SATA-I, just like USB, right?" Anyway, FreeNAS was whining about the M1015 firmware version (19) not matching the driver version (16), so I decided to deal with that problem first and then see what's up with the drives not showing up.
Now, I hadn't been paying attention before or I would've noticed that none of the new 120GB Seagates showed up on the M1015's boot-time initialization screen either. Which would seem to explain why FreeNAS didn't see any of them. I noticed now, but went ahead and erased and reflashed the M1015 with the proper Phase 16 IT firmware, _without_ the boot rom since most of the instructions I found just leave it out. Without the boot rom there's no more initialization screen, so I couldn't see what the M1015 thought was attached, but when I booted up FreeNAS lo and behold all drives were now visible! And of course I was able to create a ZFS volume and a share and start playing around. I had even replaced the 500GB drive with another 120GB Seagate just so they would all match (yes I know that's not strictly necessary).
All working now, fantastic, right? But when I don't understand why things happen it's always worrisome. As far as I know the card was in IT mode the whole time, so why would only the 500GB former Time Capsule drive show up at the boot rom initialization screen? Was it the boot rom that was somehow interfering? If I flash the mptsas2.rom back to the card will all my drives suddenly disappear again?
I'd appreciate any input from those more experienced with these cards. Is there some reason to consider this normal behavior for an M1015?
Just to see if it was possible, I tried to cross-flash the built-in LSI 9240-8i card to IT mode. No DOS or EFI flashing utilities would even acknowledge that any LSI card was present in the machine with the RAID500 installed. I went ahead and replaced it with an IBM ServeRaid M1015 from eBay that was pre-flashed to Phase 19 firmware, IT mode (with the BIOS ROM still installed).
Since this will be my first FreeNAS system I had ordered 10 of the smallest, cheapest decent SATA drives I could find for use as a test-bed / playground so I can make all my initial mistakes on what are basically throwaway drives. They're 120GB Seagate SATA drives that were only about $15 apiece. I went ahead and filled up the remaining 7 hard drive bays once the requisite drive caddies arrived, leaving the 500GB drive installed. Then I booted up FreeNAS, connected to it and did the initial configuration, and tried to create a ZFS volume.
At this point I was surprised to note that the only disk FreeNAS seemed to be seeing was the 500GB drive I had initially installed. No other disks were visible in the GUI. I was all like, "WTF? Did I just waste $150 on SATA drives that are too old to be compatible with the M1015?" But then I was like, "Nah, SATA connections are all backwards compatible back to SATA-I, just like USB, right?" Anyway, FreeNAS was whining about the M1015 firmware version (19) not matching the driver version (16), so I decided to deal with that problem first and then see what's up with the drives not showing up.
Now, I hadn't been paying attention before or I would've noticed that none of the new 120GB Seagates showed up on the M1015's boot-time initialization screen either. Which would seem to explain why FreeNAS didn't see any of them. I noticed now, but went ahead and erased and reflashed the M1015 with the proper Phase 16 IT firmware, _without_ the boot rom since most of the instructions I found just leave it out. Without the boot rom there's no more initialization screen, so I couldn't see what the M1015 thought was attached, but when I booted up FreeNAS lo and behold all drives were now visible! And of course I was able to create a ZFS volume and a share and start playing around. I had even replaced the 500GB drive with another 120GB Seagate just so they would all match (yes I know that's not strictly necessary).
All working now, fantastic, right? But when I don't understand why things happen it's always worrisome. As far as I know the card was in IT mode the whole time, so why would only the 500GB former Time Capsule drive show up at the boot rom initialization screen? Was it the boot rom that was somehow interfering? If I flash the mptsas2.rom back to the card will all my drives suddenly disappear again?
I'd appreciate any input from those more experienced with these cards. Is there some reason to consider this normal behavior for an M1015?