I have 2 new PCIE v3 SAS cards for my unraid server and want to replace my single PCIE v2 and Expander with the 2 new cards and no expander.  I wanted to know if anyone has done something like this and how I should go about it?

 

I think I should do the following:

 

1.  Take a screenshot of the drives in the array and what slots they are in. 

2.  Shutdown array and computer

3.  Replace card and expander with new cards

4.  Turn on computer and set up new cards bios's to be HBA and make sure their firmware is good.

5.  Turn on to unraid and make sure all drives are present.

6.  Put drives back into the array in the same slot

7.  Turn on array and hope it works

 

Does that sound right?

 

Thanks so much

Step 6 should not be required since unRAID recognises drives by their serial number.  Therefore as long as the drives can all be seen on the new card everything should just start up as it was before.

 

Having said that making sure you know where each drive should be protects you against something going wrong which might mean you have to do a New Config.

There have been instances of some controllers reporting the serial number differently for some reason, so a screenshot is a good idea.

Ok Wonderful thank you so much both of you for giving me feedback to double check before I take my 52 TB array down and bring it back up.  I will report back if I needed to do any additional steps for future googlers

You don't mention a brand or chipset for your new SAS cards. I trust that you've checked that they're supported by unRAID?

 

I have thank you for checking with me.  This is actually my 3rd UnRaid Server and I did as much research as I could before pulling the trigger on the change. 

 

Anyway I wanted to say everything went well for the set of directions except I did find a driver error which was unfortunate and had me thinking that I had bad hard drives where in fact I don't believe I did.  Luckily all of this mess is sorted out now, I will explain the driver error in my next post in order to keep it clean. 

 

I wanted to report back in this post that the instructions I gave in the first post are correct and it was actually quite easy.

 

Thanks

This post is to describe an error I found that took me a bit to figure out.  I want to explain what my system was initially as described below:

 

PCIEx8 verision 3 ---> 9211-8i ---> 4i direct ------------------------------> backplane breakout (4 drives including parity)

                                            |--> 4i --> RES2SV240 SAS Expander --> backplane breakout (20 drives)

Motherboard SATA -----------------------------------------------------------> 2 SSD drives for cache

 

I wanted to move the system to:

 

PCIEx8 version 3 ---> Adaptec 71605E ---> 4i direct ---------------------> backplane breakout (4 drives including parity)

                                                        |--> 4i direct ---------------------> backplane breakout (4 drives)

                                                        |--> 4i direct ---------------------> backplane breakout (4 drives)

PCIEx8 version 3 ---> Adaptec 71605E ---> 4i direct ---------------------> backplane breakout (4 drives)

                                                        |--> 4i direct ---------------------> backplane breakout (4 drives)

                                                        |--> 4i direct ---------------------> backplane breakout (4 drives)

Motherboard SATA -----------------------------------------------------------> 2 SSD drives for cache

 

However it took me some time to figure this out but no matter what I did the second Adaptec 71605E controller would lock up after unraid was loaded even if I switched the control cards places.  I believe there is a driver issue that does not allow 2 Adaptec Controller Cards.  I saw on the Adaptec page it was fixed in a newer version of the driver.

 

Anyway so I had to change the setup to:

 

PCIEx8 version 3 ---> Adaptec 71605E ---> 4i direct ---------------------> backplane breakout (4 drives including parity)

                                                        |--> 4i direct ---------------------> backplane breakout (4 drives)

                                                        |--> 4i direct ---------------------> backplane breakout (4 drives)

                                                        |--> 4i direct ---------------------> backplane breakout (4 drives)

PCIEx8 verision 3 ---> 9211-8i ------------> 4i direct ---------------------> backplane breakout (4 drives)

                                            |-----------> 4i ----------------------------> backplane breakout (4 drives)

Motherboard SATA -----------------------------------------------------------> 2 SSD drives for cache