Unraid not seeing drives after connecting Intel SAS expander

[giosann]

Today I wanted to take some time to do some upgrades to my Unraid NAS.

 

I already had my current drives connected like this

 

2x SATA SSDs connected directly to the motherboard

2z SATA SSDs + 6x SATA HHDs connected to a LSI 9207-8i (IBM M5110)

 

I wanted to add 2x nvme drives and connect the LSI to an expander (the Intel RAID Storage Expander RES2SV240 E91267-203)

 

So i shut everything down and connected the expander via sata power, attached all the mini sas cables to the expander and a mini sas cable from the expander to the LSI

I also put in the 2 nvme drives.

 

i boot the system and none of the drive connected trough the LSI+expander shows up. so i did some tries changing the PCI generation settings in the bios. They present like this:

 

 

I basically tried to set the gen to 3 and switch around with the lanes configuration but had no success.

I also tried taking out the GPU and powering the expander with the PCI slot instead of molex but with no results.

 

In the end i took out the expander thinking it was broken and connected the cables back to the LSI but still no disk shows up.

 

Do you have any reccomendation on what I can try? is it possible i accindetaly broke the LSI and need a new one? should i Just buy a 24i and attach everything to that?

 

I have attached diagnostics of the first time the drives did not show up (or after a reboot I can't quite remember) and the latest diagnostics.

 

Thanks

 

row 4 column 2+3 and row 5 are the hard disks. I had moved the SSDs to row1 but i moved them back to row 4 coumn 1+4 afther this ordeal.

tower-diagnostics-20241020-1612.zip tower-diagnostics-20241020-1730.zip

[giosann]

Looking at page 16 of the manual it seems like I can't use the third PCIe slot if the second M2 slot is connected?

 

Is there anything I can do? I wanted to put system and appdata on NVME... Maybe i can keep one and just back it up

[Vr2Io]

You can buy an NVMe to PCIe_1x adapter and use PCIe_1x slot ( PCIe_E4), but will limited the throughput.  ( free M2_2 so can use HBA )

 

Edited October 20 by Vr2Io

[giosann]

Thanks @Vr2Io, I'll see if it's needed, in the end how much speed will i lose? i bought a nvme drive to have a better performance out of the containers.

For now I'll just run 1 i think since it was that the problem and taking out the second nvme drive solved the issue.

[Vr2Io]

It will max at PCIe 3.0 x1, still have around 1GB/s. The other onboard M2 still in full speed.

Edited October 20 by Vr2Io

[giosann]

I usually do a btrfs pool so i imagine that it would be bottle-necked by the slower one. I don't know how much difference it would make.

Do you reccomend doing something different?

 

Maybe i could just keep one but it's not very comfortable.

[Vr2Io]

I suppose you are talking mirror pool, if speed were important, then I would go to standalone route and periodic sync between two NVMe.

 

If speed not concern too much, then mirror both as usual also fine.