unRAID 6 - LSI SAS9200-8e not recognizing multiple SATA drives

[Clack]

I've been reading through the general support forums for a bit now attempting to figure out what on earth is causing my issues where I cannot get the LSI SAS9200-8e attached to an old Dell Optiplex 9020 with 16GB of RAM to access more than one WD RED drive at a time.  I'm using a SAS-to-SATA Forward breakout cable to attach to the drives, and I can get each drive to be recognized by the BIOS and Unraid's System Devices report, but when I attempt to plug two or three drives in, the system only recognizes a single disk in Unraid, and the BIOS hard locks and the computer must be rebooted to proceed.

 

SAS card bios (Avago MPT SAS2 BIOS - 7.39.02.00):

- SAS9200-8e w/ SAS2008 topology - firmware revision 20.00.07.00-IT
- NVDATA version 14.01.00.08

- Plugged into PCI-E 16x port, no other PCI devices attached

 

Drives attached:

- total 3 WD Red units, 2 WD20EFRX and 1 WD20EFZX

- 1 SanDisk 240GB SSD attached via internal SATA (Unraid recognizes just fine)

 

I'm hazarding a guess that it's either the cable or there's something else going on with the SAS board.  Before I start throwing hardware (and money) at the issue, does anyone have any suggestions?  Any advice is appreciated!

tower-diagnostics-20211221-1345.zip

[JorgeB]

Very strange issue, can you try the HBA with all the disks in a different PC?

[Clack]

Unfortunately this is the only PC I have at the moment.  I'm cursed with laptops surrounding me.

[Clack]

After much gnashing of teeth, buying additional hardware, wailing, and utlimately pleading with the Computer Gods (Praise Be Unto Linus, He of the Free Software) I figured out what is happening.  This update is for anyone else running into this issue going into the future.

 

Dell BIOS, as best as I can tell, has an incomplete or buggy Legacy Boot option and needs a UEFI Boot to properly identify all the devices on the SAS9200-8e HBA.  Poster Mthrboard over on Serverbuilds.net posted an excellent how-to guide on updating the LSI HBAs with a UEFI-capable BIOS for boot, and following it to the letter updated my board firmware, BIOS, and most importantly from what I can tell, the UEFI ROM loaded on the 9200-8e.  The firmware, ROMs and appropriate sas2flash EFI versions are present in their links, and following the update procedures there allowed me to boot with the HBA via UEFI.  I booted into the Windows instance I temporarily installed and found that every drive is present and running fine, and from there Unraid recognized all the drives and I have my 30-day trial running successfully.

 

Special thanks again to Mthrboard over at Serverbuilds.net for posting up that how-to that basically solved every issue I've had with this Dell Optiplex-based server build.  I also happen to have an extra forward breakout SAS-to-SATA cable as well as a pre-flashed SAS9207-8E to put up on eBay real cheap sometime soon.