I've been doing a lot of reading, and I've decided to upgrade some of my 3x Norco RPC-4220s to a couple of Dell C2100s. So I have two of those, each with 24GB ECC RAM, and they came with the 5i or 6i card or whatever, but I replaced that with an M1015 I flashed to IT mode, FW 20.00.04.00 from the Avago website. The backplane that came with the C2100 isn't like anything I've been able to find elsewhere. I have a part number that results in nothing from Google, DAS45TB16G0. There is no sticker above that number to indicate the Dell Part Number. This backplane has three SFF-8484 connectors, one each for four HDDs in the front. The 5i or 6i has SFF-8484 cables, but the M1015 has SFF-8087, so I bought four of the Ably 3ft. SFF-8087 to SFF-8484 cables from Amazon and switched them. There is still the original cable from 4 SATA ports to the SFF-8484 on the backplane which I didn't need to replace. I've got FREENAS 9.3.1 running on a USB stick, and 12x 5TB Toshiba PH3500U‑1I72 in each server. I'm waiting for my other M1015 so right now only one server is up.
Here is my problem: I can't make a raidz-anything that includes disks from the M1015 controller. I have a raidz1 using ada0, ada1, ada2, and ada3 (which are all from the motherboard ports using the original Dell cable, and I made it just to see if it could work and yes I know 4 disks is not optimal for raidz1, but that isn't the deciding factor here), but anything that tries to use da0 through da7 to extend the existing raidz1 results in errors such as:
Unable to GPT format da-whatever
Also during boot I get many ISCSI errors on the da-whatever drives, but never the ada ones.
CAM Status: SCSI Status Error
SCSI status: Check Condition
SCSI sense: UIT ATTENTION asc:29,0 (Power on, reset, or bus device reset occurred)
Then these keep happening and of course I get:
Device: /dev/da1 [SAT], ATA error count increased from 335 to 359 (this happens often enough, but these drives are new, and if I put them in the ada slots, they don't happen).
The disks are all brand new. Sometimes when I go to wipe them it won't let me, but always only with the disks attached to the M1015 using the sff-8087 -> sff-8484 cable. All of the disks appear in the OS, so I'm thinking it's not that I bought a backwards cable. I also changed out the first two cables for the second two cables with no luck. I'm at quite the loss for what else I can do here to get this up and running, and have searched and searched the forums and found that a C2100 is okay for FREENAS, M1015 is a great idea when flashed to IT mode, and the 5TB Toshiba drive is fine too. The only thing I can think of is that the machine doesn't like any of the four cables I purchased, or there is a backplane issue and maybe I should get one that is SFF-8087 (like this one. If anyone can help me further diagnose this issue it would be greatly appreciated.
Camcontrol devlist yields da devices appearing this way:
<ATA TOSHIBA MD04ACA5 FP2A>
While ada devices appear this way:
<TOSHIBA MD04ACA5 FP2A>
I also get smart errors on the da drives. Given I have 24 drives, I have switched them out enough so that the errors do not occur when placed in the ada slots. What is causing all of these errors? I read somewhere about an experimental iSCSI driver that had given people some grief, but that it had been fixed and integrated into the build, so I don't think that is it. I just don't know at this point and have many other things I could be doing.
Here is my problem: I can't make a raidz-anything that includes disks from the M1015 controller. I have a raidz1 using ada0, ada1, ada2, and ada3 (which are all from the motherboard ports using the original Dell cable, and I made it just to see if it could work and yes I know 4 disks is not optimal for raidz1, but that isn't the deciding factor here), but anything that tries to use da0 through da7 to extend the existing raidz1 results in errors such as:
Unable to GPT format da-whatever
Also during boot I get many ISCSI errors on the da-whatever drives, but never the ada ones.
CAM Status: SCSI Status Error
SCSI status: Check Condition
SCSI sense: UIT ATTENTION asc:29,0 (Power on, reset, or bus device reset occurred)
Then these keep happening and of course I get:
Device: /dev/da1 [SAT], ATA error count increased from 335 to 359 (this happens often enough, but these drives are new, and if I put them in the ada slots, they don't happen).
The disks are all brand new. Sometimes when I go to wipe them it won't let me, but always only with the disks attached to the M1015 using the sff-8087 -> sff-8484 cable. All of the disks appear in the OS, so I'm thinking it's not that I bought a backwards cable. I also changed out the first two cables for the second two cables with no luck. I'm at quite the loss for what else I can do here to get this up and running, and have searched and searched the forums and found that a C2100 is okay for FREENAS, M1015 is a great idea when flashed to IT mode, and the 5TB Toshiba drive is fine too. The only thing I can think of is that the machine doesn't like any of the four cables I purchased, or there is a backplane issue and maybe I should get one that is SFF-8087 (like this one. If anyone can help me further diagnose this issue it would be greatly appreciated.
Camcontrol devlist yields da devices appearing this way:
<ATA TOSHIBA MD04ACA5 FP2A>
While ada devices appear this way:
<TOSHIBA MD04ACA5 FP2A>
I also get smart errors on the da drives. Given I have 24 drives, I have switched them out enough so that the errors do not occur when placed in the ada slots. What is causing all of these errors? I read somewhere about an experimental iSCSI driver that had given people some grief, but that it had been fixed and integrated into the build, so I don't think that is it. I just don't know at this point and have many other things I could be doing.
Last edited:
