Help with LSI HBA 9201-16e v20 - IT Mode


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I am trying to add more disks to my server but am having some trouble with the LSI 9201-16e. I have confirmed it has the latest firmware and is in IT-Mode. 

 

https://imgur.com/gallery/xC5yeEQ

 

Cables: Mini sas SFF-8088 TO 4x SATA 7Pin,Mini-SAS Male TO SATA Adapter Cable 1M - https://www.ebay.com/itm/133029692746

 

Card: LSI 9201-16E PCI-E 2.0 x8 IT MODE 16 PORT SAS SFF8088 ZFS UNRAID TRUENAS PC -  https://www.ebay.com/itm/313549609988

 

I followed this video to the best of my ability - 

 

 

With everything powered down I install the card and hard drive. Then plug everything in. I power up the external enclosure and then my Unraid server. The drive does not show up in unassigned devices.

 

What am I doing wrong here? Do I have the wrong cable? Did I miss a setting in the BIOS?

 

Thanks in advance.

Edited by jginzkey
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18 hours ago, JorgeB said:

Controllers seem to be working fine, since they have a BIOS flashed see if the drives are detected there.

 

That HDD does not appear in the LSI 9201-16E BIOS. I have already tried a different cable but no luck there.

 

Should I consider reflashing? It came flashed already in IT mode. 

 

Maybe some more relevant info... I dunno: The 16e card that is not working is in my second PCIE slot and the 16i HBA card is in my third PCIE slot.

 

I am stumped here.

Edited by jginzkey
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On 6/19/2021 at 12:34 AM, Vr2Io said:

Suggest remove the 16i card and plug 16e card in third PCIE slot.

Does those disks spinup ?

I moved the card over to the third slot. No disk appeared in the LSI/Avago BIOS for the 16e card. The 16i card worked as expected, as it previously had. The disk connected to the 16e card powers up I can feel it vibrate when powered out but it does not should in the SAS topology.

 

I also tried plugging in the hard drive into the same PSU as the server that has the card in it and connecting it to the 16E card but it made no difference. (Perviosly I had it in a external enclosure. 

 

I checked all of the BIOS settings of both cards and the only difference I can see the the firmware version is different. The 16i card is showing 19.0-IT and the 16e card is 20.0-IT

 

Edited by jginzkey
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26 minutes ago, tjb_altf4 said:

Are these enterprise or shucked HDDs?
Might be the 3.3V issue

 

WD 10TB Red Drive. Not shucked. I think I got it straight from WD. Just to run down every lead I will test the drive it self in another computer as I haven't done that yet. But I do not suspect that to be the issue.

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  • 4 weeks later...

The port furthest from the motherboard is apparently is the first port... Once I populated that port the HDD showed up. I tried the port closest to the mother board and the 3rd furthest and just assumed they all didn't work during my initial troubleshooting. But eventually I broke down to that level of trouble shooting and figured out it was the port I was using... I haven't had the HDDs to test but I'm worried if when I need to expand to a new port on the card it will not work... Time will tell.

Edited by jginzkey
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  • 1 year later...

Did you ever solve this? I am having a similar issue with 2 of these cards atm. I have just added a 24bay chassis as a jbod and trying to use 2 of these cards to connect. As with your experience I am seeing a couple of drives show up when connected to the first port... But I have 4 drives plugged into it. No drives show up when attached to any other port. Very annoying and hard to trouble shoot

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I was never able to definitely come up with root cause and just jerry rigged it. 

 

Ultimately I think it came down to pcie lanes or broken wires in the breakout cable. can't really say for sure. Sorry.

 

I switched to a supermicro server from the server store and haven't looked back. Highly recommend, only issue I had with this was something to do with the display wanting to go through the Quadro p4000 instead of the on board DVI. Had to change bios setting. Got lucky and found it on some forum or blog post on a random Google search.

 

 

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Yea I'm on a supermicro h12ssl-i. So I've plenty of pci lanes. I've got sff8088 to sff8088s connected to a sff8088 to sff8087 card then from their to a sas6gb backplane. 

 

I've noticed there are different types of sff8088 cables so I've new ones ordered just to rule it out. 

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I was just looking at the length of the cables since i got from 8088 to 8088 into a 8088 to 8087 adapter then 8087 to 8087 backplane... i think i may be on the very limit (1M) for distance for SATA drives... I wonder if this is possibly the reason 2 are showing up and not all 4? I have 2 SAS expanders from a previous build... I wonder if these could be used like repeaters? As I know SAS drives will work up to 10M. 

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