After all the issues I had previously, I decided to swap to a Supermicro x10DRH-CT in an 847 case to avoid/minimize wiring issues and make it easier to maintain. That said, the mobo came from a different case, so I'm not sure if that's the culprit or something else.

 

On to the problem: if I start the array with 16 or fewer drives on the 24 drive backplane, Unraid works fine and sees all of them. It will ignore any drives on the 12 drive plane(as far as I know - haven't fully tested it). If I attempt to start Unraid with more than 16 drives attached to the 24 plane, it sees 0 drives. This seems to be regardless of which drive the "17th" is (I have 23 drives in total and have tested adding a few different ones). I have both planes wired (8087 to 8643) to the mobo from their J0 ports. If I start Unraid  with 16 drives and add the 17th after booting into the OS (which is what the diagnostics are from) it sees the 16 drives and ignores the 17th.

 

I have confirmed through trial and error that the setup has the capability of hot swapping drives as long as the array isn't up. I have attempted googling quite a bit and I've been stuck on this issue for over a week at this point, so I figured it's time to reach out.

raptor1-diagnostics-20230729-1315.zip

Do you have a HBA you could test with instead of the RAID controller?

I tried one of my HBAs before I received the 8087 to 8643 cables to connect the backplane directly to the motherboard. The HBA was a whole other can of worms that basically amounted to "you have to use the mobo connections".

Edited August 1, 20232 yr by idrivesidewayz

10 hours ago, idrivesidewayz said:

The HBA was a whole other can of worms that basically amounted to "you have to use the mobo connections".

Why? Which HBA model?

9220-8i

 

I think I got it mixed up there because I tried so many different things. Stuck in a different HBA (known working from previous server - also 9220-8i) and all the drives appear in Unraid. I think it was no drives in BIOS that was throwing me off.

 

That said, I'm not sure why plugging into the mobo causes them to not show in Unraid (past 16), but they do show in BIOS.

Edited August 5, 20232 yr by idrivesidewayz

So it's working now?

Yep, it works now. I had tried so many different things that I guess I got problems mixed up in my head.

 

I'm hoping to understand why I have to use a card instead of the mobo connections.

 

This is technically resolved, but I wanted to leave it open in case you had an answer or could help diagnose "why".