Treytor

I bought a used SuperMicro 4u case on ebay, and didn't know about the 2TB drive limit with the SAS1 backplane that came with it and am now paying the price. Does anyone have an extra BPN-SAS2-846EL1 they'd be willing to part with to help me out? I'd like to not have to spend as much as I spent on the server initially to get this backplane. Thanks!

Yeah... Once I get a hold of the supplier (a large ebay refurbished seller) I may ask if they have a SAS2 backplane they'd be willing to sell me minus the difference of the broken SAS1 backplane. This is 3 times now that I've moved all 20 drives from one server to the other. Frankly I'm surprised the old one still fires up each time without issue. Thanks again for your feedback guys!

So I haven't made much headway, but in my troubleshooting I went into the LSI card's BIOS and found a screen where it lists all the connected devices. This screen automatically refreshes when you add or remove devices, so I proceeded to remove ALL the drives and tried a single 2TB spare in each bay to make sure they all work. Surprisingly, the drive didn't even spin up on 4 of the 24 bays. This is reproducible with other drives in those "dead" bays as well. So I believe I had a faulty backplane to begin with. I will contact the seller to see if I can get a replacement and keep you posted. Thanks again for your help!

Hmm! The motherboard is a Supermicro X8DTE-F (REV 1.3), and the card was in slot 3 which is PCI-E 2.0x4. I just moved it to slot 4 which is PCI-E 2.0x8 (and the fastest available on this board). Booting now... I poked around a bit in the BIOS of the card and didn't see anything obviously out of whack. It did recognize the backplane as supporting up to 24 devices. Weird... Those didn't come up when I searched. That's a little better I suppose. Thank you!

Interesting... Waiting for it to boot up now. Still taking a LONG time to boot up and initialize. Would there be any reason your Dell Perc H310 would work and my LSI 9210-8i wouldn't?

Trying that now, thank you. Do you have drives bigger than 2TB on your backplane? What controller are you using with it exactly? Thanks again for your feedback!

Yeah, they're also $700 on ebay...

It has 3 ports. I've been plugging J1 and J2 into my controller, as that's how it was with the Adaptec 5805 controller. I was under the impression that J0 was for hooking to another (possibly external) backplane?

So that card arrived today and I installed it, but still having some problems. It took FOREVER to initialize (longer than 10 minutes), and when it finally did, none of my drives were visible to UNRAID. I tried removing them all and just putting 2 spare drives (2TB and 5TB) and that seemed to work just fine, so I don't think there's a size limitation on the controller card or the backplane with the >2TB drive, but for some reason when I plug them all in (20 drives, currently) it completely fails. Any ideas? Do you think it's the backplane that might be causing the problems?

Thanks for the reply, I posted a new thread about it here if you're interested in my findings: https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=56030.0

Okay, ordered. Hopefully this works! Thank you

Would this work? - http://www.ebay.com/itm/UNRAID-IT-Mode-LSI-9210-8i-SAS-SATA-8-port-PCI-E-6Gb-s-Controller-Card-FREENAS-/142233544984?hash=item211dc7a918:g:zEwAAOSw44BYbDdQ

I just repeated the procedure but proceeded to wipe the config and start a new array, and assign the 2 drives to see if it picked it up. That did not work, and UNRAID said the drives were unmountable. I had to format them to bring the now empty array online through the Adaptec controller / backplane. Side note: I now notice the drive temps and SMART data is not accessible through the adaptec controller / backplane as well... Ugh, this is turning into a nightmare! Thanks again for your input, guys. I tried it but it doesn't really work. The controller times out while waiting for the drives to spin up, and if I proceed anyway UNRAID throws a bunch of errors and a few drives are missing. The missing drives appear to be random each reboot, as well. I only tried it a few times though so I don't know for certain what might be going on here. Do you know if an LSI based controller will be able to read SMART data / drive temps through the backplane?

Okay, so I just made a quick new array with 2 drives (no parity) directly connected to the motherboard's SATA ports and copied a few files over. I then powered down and moved the drives over to the Adaptec controller / backplane, initialized them in the controller's BIOS (as JBOD), then booted into UNRAID. Interestingly the drives showed up in UNRAID (with the same identification serial numbers), but UNRAID reported the drives as being wrong. I figured this means the controller was in fact destructively wiping the drives. Out of curiosity I tried moving them back to the mobo SATA connectors, and the array came back online with the files intact! Very perplexing... The Adaptec controller initialization is NOT destructive, but it's doing something to cause UNRAID to not recognize the drives. Any ideas?

I'm in the process of moving all my drives back to the old enclosure while I figure this out (Plex server downtime isn't fun). That's a good idea, I think I will try that.