Problems with Dell H200 and R710

[Brad Bowers]

I'm running a Dell R710 with an H200 inside. 6x 2TB Hitachi HUA72202 SATA drives. I've tried flashing this H200 to any firmware I can get my hands on, from the Dell stuff, to the LSI stuff and I can't for the life of me get this thing to see the drives correctly. The closest I can get is the 6GBPSAS.FW from dell, which will see the drives, but the speed seems like it's SATA I speeds, which you can see in the screenshots below. Nothing else will even show the drives.

This is how the card shows up when it's on the 6GBPSAS.FW from dell. Found this when poking around and noticed the 150MB/s... Any ideas if I can actually get this working or not? Or if I should just move to another card and be done with it?

 

[HoneyBadger]

Did you follow a specific guide to get it crossflashed to the LSI FW? If so, post it here please.

The usual guide is "record SAS address, sbrempty.bin, cleanflash, reboot, 6GBPSAS.FW flash, restore SAS address, reboot, 2118IT.bin flash"

Other than that - are you sure you haven't been bamboozled and someone snuck a SAS1 expander/backplane in your R710?

 

[Chris Moore]

The closest I can get is the 6GBPSAS.FW from dell, which will see the drives, but the speed seems like it's SATA I speeds, which you can see in the screenshots below. Nothing else will even show the drives.

There is a very specific order of events with those cards. You must flash a specific Dell firmware, then a specific old LSI firmware that will let you cross-flash from the RAID firmware to the IT firmware, then the latest LSI firmware to bring it up to date. If you don't follow the correct steps, it will never work.

 

[Brad Bowers]

I've followed the exact steps in the techmattr post. It successfully flashes whether I go to the 6GB first then direct to IT or with the interim flash in the middle. But none of the LSI ones will see the drives. Would I be looking for a specific part number for a SAS1 expander/backplane??

 

[Brad Bowers]

For clarity... I swapped out the original Perc/6i with the SFF-8484_SFF-8087 cables for an H200 card with the SFF-8087_SFF-8087's for this controller. The H200 see's the drives but the controller will only show up in freenas with 150mb/s for them and only on the Dell FW.

 

[Chris Moore]

I've followed the exact steps in the techmattr post. It successfully flashes whether I go to the 6GB first then direct to IT or with the interim flash in the middle. But none of the LSI ones will see the drives. Would I be looking for a specific part number for a SAS1 expander/backplane??

Those instructions appear to be incomplete. There are special requirements for changing from the Dell firmware to the LSI firmware that are not expressed. I would suggest that you look to the guidance in this forum post:

Detailed newcomers' guide to crossflashing LSI 9211 HBA and variants
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...o-crossflashing-lsi-9211-hba-and-variants.54/

 

[Brad Bowers]

I'm missing how the guide I followed is incomplete other than a huge lack of explanation? I erased the card, flashed the Dell FW with sas2flsh.exe -o -f 6GBPSAS.FW, sas2flsh.exe -o -f 2118p7, s2fp19.exe -o -f 2118it.bin. So this would be Dell IT, LSI IT P7, LSI IT P20 or whatever it was. Seems like the same process that was described in the post you linked? Unless I need to go back to the original original Dell IR->Dell IT and then on from there?

 

[Brad Bowers]

Ok so I figured out part of the problem and had to use the P20 sas2flsh instead of the P19 one the other guide suggests. So it's officially in IT mode now. But I have another problem still... the 6x 2TB Hitachi HUA72202 SATA drives don't spin up at all. But a Seagate drive I have will spin up just fine... These Hitachi drives were supposedly from a Compellent disk shelf according to the ebay listing I got them from. Is there a special firmware on them possibly?

 

[Chris Moore]

It might be the 3.3 volt shutdown issue. I don't know when they started adding that feature to drives, but HGST was one of the first ones to do it.
If one of those disks will spin using a MOLEX to SATA power adapter, then that is the issue.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[Brad Bowers]

Tried covering the 3.3v pins and no dice, still won't spin up. But the Seagate drive does right away. So, on boot I notice mps0: Firmware: 20.00.07.00, Driver: 21.02.00.00-fbsd The latest I've found was LSI P20 for the H200, would this just be a firmware/driver mismatch being incompatible with these drives? I did find newer firmware for the drives themselves but having issues updating it. But again, these drives spin up on the same card with the Dell H200 IT firmware, just running at 150MB/s.

 

[Chris Moore]

Firmware: 20.00.07.00, Driver: 21.02.00.00-fbsd The latest I've found was LSI P20 for the H200, would this just be a firmware/driver mismatch

No, that is the correct driver and correct firmware. They were once in sync numerically, but they stopped updating the card firmware a couple years ago. Newer cards have come out since then.
Do these drives spin up when connected to a SATA port? It is strange.

 

[Brad Bowers]

They spin up when connected to the very same server/backplane/8087-8087cable/H200 card.... but the difference is that the H200 card is on the Dell IT firmware instead of the LSI P20 IT firmware. And on the Dell IT firmware they only run at SATA I speeds. That being said I've been putting them in another machine to test and they work just fine. So they stop working/spinning up once I get to the proper LSI P20 IT firmware. That being said, anyone wanna buy an H200 card? lol Apparently I need another one or different drives.