SAS 2008 HBA (IT mode) - No drives showing in BIOS Util or FreeNAS OS

RaidPirate

Dabbler
Joined
Sep 25, 2020
Messages
14
Hi,

Just recieved a HBA from eBay. I can't get it to detect any drives. I'm not super familiar with FreeNAS, but I have also tried a few things using a Debian live USB.

Here's what I've tried:

Plugged in all 6 of my new Toshiba HDDs, booted system, and no disks except ata0 (FreeNAS OS drive) are seen.

This is across 2 SAS to SATA cables. Tried swapping cables around. Unlikely that they are both defecive? But possible? These are new cables manufactured by Silverstone.

Rebooted system, checked that HBA shows up after BIOS (it does) enter SAS bios util (CTRL-C) and check drives - no devices found.

Unplugged all drives from power and SATA. Connect single drive, repeat, no difference.

Rebooted again, this time trying a WD SSD instead of HDD. Again, could not detect this SSD with either HBA BIOS util or FreeNAS OS.

Rebooted to Debian live system. Tried both HDDs and SSDs. lspci shows the HBA. dkms shows that "mpt3sas" (not "mpt2sas" ?) driver is loaded. No errors as far as I can tell.

Tried lsscsi - no drives.

I know the SSD is working. It works with a USB to Sata adapter, and also works with a native MB sata port. Same situation regarding the HDDs.

I'm kind of out of ideas as this point. What else should I check in software/hardware?
 

Ericloewe

Server Wrangler
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Feb 15, 2014
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20,176
Did you by any chance buy reverse breakout cables instead of forward breakout cables?
 

RaidPirate

Dabbler
Joined
Sep 25, 2020
Messages
14
You might be onto something there - I checked the box these cables came in and they say SFF (TARGET) to SATA (HOST) - so I've ordered some different ones, which I hope are the other direction. I had no clue there were "directional" cables. As a matter of interest do you know how they are wired up? Presumably they are in some manner physically different, else they would all be bidirectional.
 

Ericloewe

Server Wrangler
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Feb 15, 2014
Messages
20,176
SATA devices and SATA controllers have their Tx and Rx pairs swapped to allow for cheap and simple cables and devices. IIRC, SFF-8087 and SFF-8643 use the same pinout at both ends with the cables responsible for linking up Rx on one end to Tx on the other end.
 
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