SOLVED M1015 from Ebay, no activity lights, drives don't show up.

[paperElectron]

Motherboard is a X11SSM-F-O, E3-1240 v5, 32Gb of samsung DDR4 from the supermicro recommended hardware list.

Picked the card up from ebay for $100, planned on flashing it with efi shell, no luck, "NO LSI Devices found", created a DOS boot disk, ran "megarec -adplist" nothing found. Plugged it into an old windows box, same results.

Any advice? Aside from the arcane science of flashing these cards, it should just work when plugged into a PCI slot? Im not missing anything simple?

Im really half tempted to just get an LSI 9211-8i, partially because I have so much money into this build already that an extra $100 at this point is just "meh", and partially because the upwards pointing connectors on the M1015 kind of suck in a 2u chassis.

Edit: For anyone that stumbles here from Google:

After testing the card in a Supermicro X11 mobo, as well as an Asrock Mobo running Win 7, still no activity lights and the card is not seen. I decided to pull out my multimeter and check the fuse labelled "f1", right above PCI pin 4-5 on the connector side of the card. Sure enough it was an open circuit, so at some point in this cards life it was exposed to overvoltage, overcurrent, or some pretty bad ESD.

 

[Ericloewe]

partially because the upwards pointing connectors on the M1015 kind of suck in a 2u chassis.

Definitely a good reason to go with an SAS 9211.

If the M1015 doesn't show up at all with sas2ircu, sas2flash or similar it might be broken.

Does it show up on dmidecode or Windows' device manager?

 

[paperElectron]

Does it show up on dmidecode or Windows' device manager?

I actually pulled the half height bracket off of it and slapped it into a windows box after I made that post last night, no activity lights and it doesn't show up in device manager. I definitely think it is DOA, and I think I am pretty committed to just getting a 9211-8i due to the connector location, I can get the cables to fit with the M1015 but I have to bend them sharply to do it and I really would prefer to not do that.

 

[jgreco]

It's probably broken. Sorry for your troubles. :-(

Do note that the Dell H310 is a similar option at a lower price point, but is somewhat more of a PITA to flash over to IT mode. If the price differential for the 9211 isn't a show stopper, the 9211 is generally somewhat nicer than all these hack-em-up cards.

 

[paperElectron]

If the price differential

With the drives, Chassis, Rack frame (And $900 of 80/20 Aluminum framing to build a mobile closet for it) I have almost $3k into this build, Im not super worried about an extra $100 or so. Im worried about returning the One from Ebay however. Probably going to pick this one up.

 

[jgreco]

Sorry, hazards of eBay. I usually have pretty good luck when I go the eBay route, but then again there's a lot of stuff I avoid because it feels too sketchy.

 

[paperElectron]

Sorry, hazards of eBay.

It happens, worst case I cant get a refund and I get a new working M1015 out of the deal, Does this forum have a classifieds?

Also, while I have one of the resident experts in my thread, (your posts helped inform me about how to proceed with this), what is your opinion of 9.10.x? Im installing into two 16GB SM SuperDoms, and when I finally got my hardware build out the other night, I just clicked the main "Download" link, which points to 9.10, I installed this via mounting the ISO in IPMI, worked perfectly. Then I decided that I probably wanted to be on the 9.3.1 branch for stability reasons... Alas no booting from USB in 9.3.x on a X11 Mobo, and that is what the IPMI iso mounts as.

I don't think I have a mobo around that can power the SataDom modules, so I would have to pull a hdd from something and make a bootable drive to install 9.3.x with. Do you think thats worth the trouble, or is 9.10 ok at the moment for home use?

 

[jgreco]

I upgraded to 9.10 on our long suffering N36L backups box and it has been a total nonevent, even though it was an upgrade that went from 8.3.1 -> 9.10. I like nonevents. Upgrade drama is the worst. Aside from any possible jail-related concerns, which seem to be the biggest downside to 9.10, I have a hard time imagining that it'd cause you grief.

 

[paperElectron]

grief.

I think I saw a thread on reddit about "old" jails from prior installs having issues, is there an issue with ones made fresh? About the only one Im interested in using is Plex, and even that isn't a dealbreaker for me, as Im already running an ESXi VM to do the same thing.

 

[jgreco]

No idea. I don't use the jails. Virtual machines FTW.

 

[paperElectron]

Yeah, I'm with you there. My whole workflow in my homelab is based around setting up and tearing down VMs, so I probably wont even bother with jails.

 

[Ericloewe]

I think I saw a thread on reddit about "old" jails from prior installs having issues, is there an issue with ones made fresh? About the only one Im interested in using is Plex, and even that isn't a dealbreaker for me, as Im already running an ESXi VM to do the same thing.

You pretty much have to nuke the old jails to make "new" ones, if I understand correctly. Those new jeep jails should work normally, though.

 

[Ericloewe]

Does this forum have a classifieds?

No, but informal listings in the Offtopic section are fine, if you apply common sense (don't pretend to be iXsystems, don't offer shady stuff, don't spam...).