February 3, 20179 yr Author Well two things come to mind. What slot do you have your HBA in? One of the very knowledgeable and friendly people helping me out on here when I was having issues, pointed out that the 16X slot I had my card in initially was really only running at 4x, so I put it in an 8x slot and it was fine. The other thing is the BIOS of your card, have you gone into it and gone through the settings to make sure nothing is turned on or turned off that shouldn't be? Hmm! The motherboard is a Supermicro X8DTE-F (REV 1.3), and the card was in slot 3 which is PCI-E 2.0x4. I just moved it to slot 4 which is PCI-E 2.0x8 (and the fastest available on this board). Booting now... I poked around a bit in the BIOS of the card and didn't see anything obviously out of whack. It did recognize the backplane as supporting up to 24 devices. Actually they're about half of that -- here's a listing for $400 "or best offer" ... the last couple of sales have been at $350 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-BPN-SAS2-846EL1-24-Port-4U-SAS-SATA-Expander-Backplane-SAS2-846EL1-/351971545061?hash=item51f3238fe5:g:b90AAOSwjDZYkgSs Weird... Those didn't come up when I searched. That's a little better I suppose. Thank you!
February 3, 20179 yr Author So I haven't made much headway, but in my troubleshooting I went into the LSI card's BIOS and found a screen where it lists all the connected devices. This screen automatically refreshes when you add or remove devices, so I proceeded to remove ALL the drives and tried a single 2TB spare in each bay to make sure they all work. Surprisingly, the drive didn't even spin up on 4 of the 24 bays. This is reproducible with other drives in those "dead" bays as well. So I believe I had a faulty backplane to begin with. I will contact the seller to see if I can get a replacement and keep you posted. Thanks again for your help!
February 3, 20179 yr Community Expert So I believe I had a faulty backplane to begin with. I will contact the seller to see if I can get a replacement and keep you posted. Thanks again for your help! That's a possibility, I found it strange that the SASLP didn't work also, but there's still a chance that you'll have issues with the large disks, ashman70 is using the newer BPN-SAS2
February 3, 20179 yr Author Yeah... Once I get a hold of the supplier (a large ebay refurbished seller) I may ask if they have a SAS2 backplane they'd be willing to sell me minus the difference of the broken SAS1 backplane. This is 3 times now that I've moved all 20 drives from one server to the other. Frankly I'm surprised the old one still fires up each time without issue. Thanks again for your feedback guys!
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