HBA card borked or am I an idiot?

[Smork]

I've been fighting with a LSI 9207-8i HBA I got off eBay for a few days now. The card shows up in the BIOS of 2 different computers, but no drives ever show up. I was able to access the LSI BIOS and it also reports no drives. If I plug the drives into the SATA ports on the motherboard, they show up right away. I made sure that the card is in IT mode, tried changing PCI slots, changing the lanes to x8/x8, setting the lanes to gen 3, taking out the GPU, both ports on the 9207, and double checked I was using a forward breakout cable by buying a new one. Probably tried a few other things in the past few days of digging through different forums and videos that I don't remember.

The drives in question are 3 Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC530 WUH721414ALE604. I am using adapter SATA cables that let the drives power on (power disable feature).

I'm attaching part of my logs that show that the card is being recognised and what appears to be the 3 drives attached. I also have an 850 Pro plugged into a motherboard SATA port that shows up. If anyone could provide input I would appreactiate it, or if any more information is needed, I will post what I can. Thanks for any help.

 

[Nemesiz]

Try to add mpt3sas.max_queue_depth=10000 to your kernel boot line in /etc/default/grub or /etc/kernel/cmdline

 

[sb-jw]

When booting, the controller initializes itself, if you have the BIOS on it, you should see this too. Does the controller give errors or do you see the drives there? Do the drives show activity when initialized?

Which cables did you buy?

 

[Smork]

Try to add mpt3sas.max_queue_depth=10000 to your kernel boot line in /etc/default/grub or /etc/kernel/cmdline

Unfortunately that didn't work, would have loved for it to be that simple.

When booting, the controller initializes itself, if you have the BIOS on it, you should see this too. Does the controller give errors or do you see the drives there? Do the drives show activity when initialized?

Which cables did you buy?

No errors on the controller, no drives show up on the LSI BIOS initialization, it just says:
0 supported devices are presented for the system boot selection!
Avago MPT boot ROM, no supported devices found!

I bought these cables: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B012BPLYJC?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1

 

[sb-jw]

Do you perhaps have bifurcation enabled? Or did you have something else in there before that you might have had to adjust for?

Can you take a picture of the hard drives?

 

[Smork]

Do you perhaps have bifurcation enabled? Or did you have something else in there before that you might have had to adjust for?

Can you take a picture of the hard drives?

Sorry for the delay, I do have bifurcation enabled. I was only able to change the top slot so I have the LSI card in that with x8/x8 enabled. I did have a GPU in that slot but before I changed it the setting was just on auto.

 

[sb-jw]

I am using adapter SATA cables that let the drives power on (power disable feature).

So based on everything you've provided here, I would say it has something to do with the SATA cables or the power. The card seems to work for me. I also don't believe that the PCIe slot has anything to do with the recognition of the drived; after all, they connected directly to the controller.

 

[Smork]

So based on everything you've provided here, I would say it has something to do with the SATA cables or the power. The card seems to work for me. I also don't believe that the PCIe slot has anything to do with the recognition of the drived; after all, they connected directly to the controller.

The drives do work if they are connected to the motherboard while using the same SATA power cable adapters. I will try using the kapton tape that it came with instead.

These are the right SAS to SATA cables yes?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B012BPLYJC?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1

How likely is it that both cables I received were defective?

 

[sb-jw]

I will try using the kapton tape that it came with instead.

Try it, I think it will work.

EDIT:
Or this is your problem: https://www.broadcom.com/support/kn...k---512e-disk-drive-support-on-lsi-raid-contr

 

[Smork]

Try it, I think it will work.

EDIT:
Or this is your problem: https://www.broadcom.com/support/kn...k---512e-disk-drive-support-on-lsi-raid-contr

Well the kapton tape did not work and I was looking into your link for a while. Unless I am understanding it wrong, the drives I have are 512e which is emulating 512 byte sectors, but it should not matter much since the card is in IT mode and is just passing the disks through to the OS.

Borrowed a couple drives to see if it was the power disable feature issue but both of the borrowed drives never loaded.

 

[sb-jw]

Basically you're right, but there are a lot of posts about it on reddit, STH and the TrueNAS forum. For some it works, for some it doesn't. Some say the 9207 is too old, Art of Servers says the chip has to be able to do it. Some people think the firmware is too old. So the statements about this are somehow very different.

In my opinion, there can't be many reasons for this, in principle everything up to the controller is ruled out and everything after that could be the problem.

 

[Smork]

@sb-jw I appreciate all your help in this, in all likelihood it has something to do with your link about Advanced Format but I'm at my sanity limit after being sick and working on this for a week.

For anyone looking for an answer to this, unfortunately I am giving up on it (a new card did not fix it). I will just be dropping my smaller drives and using only the motherboard SATA ports for now. Once I actually need more storage I will revisit this or just try using some PCIe 1x to SATA expansion cards and hope they don't have the same problem as whatever is happening with these 9207's.