SAS drives not seen in BIOS

[Khanan]

Built my first Unraid server this week.  I had five 6TB hard drives laying around plus the four 3TB SATA drives out of my readyNas.

 

Purchased an LSI 9300 16i   The SATA drives work fine.  The SAS drives aren't recognized even in the BIOS as being connected.  I can feel them spin up.  I have tried them with all four connections on the card.  SATA works in each, SAS doesn't.  

 

Hard to believe that all 5 drives or both cables are bad, so I'm stumped.  Is there some magic sauce?

 

These are the cables I ordered.

Sonilco Storage Configurations Cable Mini SAS HDD SFF-8643 to 4 SFF-8482 with 15-pin Power Port Cord (2 Cables, 0.5 Meter / 1.6 Feet) https://a.co/d/2hqmvMk

 

Thank for any thoughts you may have.

[JorgeB]

Please post the diagnostics.
 

[Khanan]

Diagnostics attached.  I don't know that it will help as the BIOS isn't seeing the drives so I don't know how Unraid would.  This is why I posted this in Hardware rather than Support as it seems to be a hardware issue.

 

A little more background:

The SAS drives were harvested from a working NetApp cluster when it was being retired.  I know I have to reformat them to 512 but sg3_utils can't see the drives either.  I don't see how all 5 drives went bad, that would be some VERY bad luck.  Then again, I don't see how two new cables are bad either as that would be some bad luck as well.  So I'm chalking this up to I've never used a SAS PCIe card and cables and figure I have configured something wrong.  I have changed almost every setting I can in the card to no avail.  The SATA drives work, the SAS aren't even detected.  

zelda-diagnostics-20241012-0858.zip

[Wody]

Your firmware is version 7, which is very out of date, the latest is 16. The broadcom site has 16.00.10 but there is a version 16.00.12 on another site available. You'll need sas3flash to flash the BIOS and firmware. (without BIOS the computer in the bios-screens wouldn't recognize the cards).

 

If the cable on the SAS port recognizes the SATA drive, then that same cable on the same port should recognize a SAS drive as well. In fact, even if the drive was broken but the electronics still work, it would be recognized. But, it could have the 3.3v issue, so try powering the cable with a molex-to-sata adapter instead of sata-power directly.

 

SAS does have some compatibility issues at times, where certain combinations of drives and controllers don't work, but it's more likely your outdated firmware or a 3.3v issue.

 

 

[JorgeB]

7 hours ago, Khanan said:

I don't know that it will help as the BIOS isn't seeing the drives so I don't know how Unraid would.

Mostly to see the hardware/firmware, follow the advice above.

[Khanan]

Thank you both Wody and JorgeB.

 

This makes very good sense and I'm ashamed I didn't think of firmware updates on the card after all the firmware I have had to install to fix issues on fiber HBAs.  I guess I was just thinking it was working with the SATA so I kept troubleshooting other stuff.

 

I found JorgeB's article on how to flash and will be following that.  Thank you for that as well.

 

 

[Khanan]

Plugging into a molex connection for power fixed the issue.  

 

Thank you so much for the help and quick replies.