My system loads fine when I have a total of 12 drives however when I try to add my 13th+ drive it immediately starts saying that it can't find a boot drive. I take the 13th+ drive back out of the loop it boots fine again. When I load into the BIOS it does see all 13/14 drives. When I go to the boot order it still shows only the USB key as the boot device however it has the [ ] brackets around it indicating a problem and it isn't bootable. Once I go back to 12 they [ ] disappear.

 

I have looked through the manual and see no mention of a maximum number of drives. Is there one that I'm just not aware of? What else could I do? I'd prefer to not have to get all new motherboard/cpu/ram.

 

I have the following:

Supermicro x8dti-f

2 x SATA SSD

11 x WD Red drives

1 x USB key (boot drive)

 

All drives (except USB of course) are connected to LSI HBAs

I had a problem like this once, it turned out to be the power supply.  Just that 1 extra drive, and things didn't work right.  Beefed up the power supply and I was able to move on.

 

Good luck

59 minutes ago, rukiddin said:

I had a problem like this once, it turned out to be the power supply.  Just that 1 extra drive, and things didn't work right.  Beefed up the power supply and I was able to move on.

 

Good luck

That was a good thought!

 

Just repeated the test removing only the SATA cables and leaving the drives themselves still powered and it still boots fine when I pull it down to 12 drives connected with data.

 

So not an easy fix like that unfortunately.