3TB Parity Disk gets splittet in 2 disks

[cogliostro]

Hi guys, I‘m new to this forum and unraid. I have an Unraid 6.6.2 server up and running since yesterday. Today I searched my stuff and found an 3TB hitachi drive for parity disk. I upgraded the Firmware on my 9650se raid controller and let them mount the drive. 9650se shows drive capacity at 2.72 TB looks ok I think. So I startet unraid and wanted to choose the new parity disk. But problem is the device is shown as 2 drives one with 2,2tb and another one with the rest. Is this a bug in unraid or do you think my raid controller makes some troubles here ? In other posts I read that this Controller could handle with newest firmware drives up to 8 TB ? Much appreciated for any help

[tstor]

You need to upgrade the firmware to the last version they created, I had the same issue before I did.

Then you need to disable “disk splitting” in the controller settings. I can’t lookup the details, because I don’t use this controller anymore, it was a bottleneck for speed.

[cogliostro]

Hi tstor, thanks for your help. Now i have found out that the drives getting splittet by the raid controller. The Controller comes stock with my SC846 Server. What raid controller you have running now ? The 9650SE i have updatet to the newest Firmware. its marked as 4.10.00.027 (latest) Firmware but Bios shows old Firmware 4.08.XX.XX maybe thats my Problem

 

EDIT: Thanks again tstor you have to disable the "Auto-Carving" option of the 9650SE to disable the Drives getting Splittet for older OS. That fixed my problem and now unraid shows the Drive as an 3 TB HDD. 

[cogliostro]

Now after the Controller works, i'm wondering why i can't get any S.M.A.R.T Values from it. I tested it in Maintanence Mode as in normal Array Mode. I decided then to connect my Cache SSDs and the Parity Disk directly via SATA to my Mainboard. There i get the SMART Status immediatly. I also try to change the vendor to 3Ware but still no SMART Values ? You have any Idea how to fix this ? 

[tstor]

I think I got SMART working by fiddling with the “disk settings” parameters (change controller type and so on). Alas I don’t remember the details anymore.
Now I have a LSI[emoji2400] SAS 9201-16i

[tstor]

I remember to have looked at the smartmontools wiki:
https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/Supported_RAID-Controllers

Also important: I am not sure that the temperature display on the main page ever worked, I could however execute tests for the individual drives and read-out the results as well as the SMART values.

[cogliostro]

UPDATE: For everyone who is unsing this controller. You have to switch inside the 9650SE Controller firmware. Make the Drives in the "Direct Attached Mode" then Export "JBODS" -> YES. 

 

Then you will see a list of your direct attached devices. Then comes the part that drives me nuts. You have to export these drives in the list. Unraid will not see that drives. Until you hit the "J" Button when you in the List of atteched devices. This will mark the Disk as "JBOD" and not as a "Single Drive" When you mark these drives as Single Drives. The Controller will create several Raid 0 Single Disks. And Shows them to unraid. Unraid will work with this. But it makes no sense. So just hit the "J" Button. THIS STEP IS NOT SHOWN ANYWHERE IN THE DOCUMENTATION OF THE CONTROLLER. I hope this helps.

[JonathanM]

All that mess is why a non-RAID LSI HBA is recommended.

[tstor]

UPDATE: For everyone who is unsing this controller. You have to switch inside the 9650SE Controller firmware. Make the Drives in the "Direct Attached Mode" then Export "JBODS"

 

Oh, sorry for not mentioning this point. I assumed you had already done that step when you asked about the disk splitting.

 

While exporting each disk as single disk RAID 0 instead of JBOD will work, it defeats the idea that in case of a major issue you can take the individual data drives out of your Unraid box and mount them on any Linux system. In such a case you would have the additional complication of the RAID header.

 

While this controller is certainly more difficult to set up than a non-RAID HBA and its performance is hampered by its age (e.g. PCIe bandwidth), I still like it:

1. It did support disks larger than 2TB even with operating Systems that did not

2. Disks can be configured for true JBOD or RAID mode

3. Despite its age it got updated to support at least 8TB disks (last size I tested)

4. It has powerful CLI tools that can be used while the OS is running

5. Support for 24 drives

6. Battery backup

7. Dirt cheap nowadays

 

If it was not for the performance limitations, I still would run this controller instead of a more recent LSI