13 Reasons Why | your drives are not showing up in your LSI HBA

[@williamfinlay4403]

Scratched my head for half an hour then found your video that told me my cable wasn't plugged all the way in till it clicked. Thank you, all working now.

[@ArtofServer]

Glad this was helpful! :-)

[@jpk6916]

You Sir made my day! Power Disable Feature was the problem. Bought a few cables from Amazon and did not notice that it was 5 instead of 4 powerlines. Switching to 4 lanes, perfection! All my drives showed up!

[@ArtofServer]

Excellent!

[@jimforbes]

Rebuilding my TrueNAS server, #1 and #10 were the culprits. Once I revisited this video and corrected the problems (yes both of them), I was able to see my disks. Thanks for the tips!

[@ArtofServer]

Glad it helped!

[@BrazenNL]

For those that don't know, the link to his store is in the description.

[@ArtofServer]

Thanks for watching!

[@metrotechguru5863]

Your presenting skills are excellent. Also, the way you organized this video was very good. I really enjoy listening to your videos because of your dynamic speaking style. Many kudos to you for sharing this information.

[@ArtofServer]

Thank you for your kind words. I can't stand to listen to my own voice, so I'll trust your judgement LOL. I hope this video helps people out.

[@metrotechguru5863]

@@ArtofServer Most people have that reaction when listening to a recording of their own voice. It resonates differently when you hear it from inside your head. Your voice is actually very pleasant. The really important aspect of your speaking is it's not monotone. Those who speak with a flat affect are very difficult to listen to for more than five minutes. You speak with feeling and dynamics which maintain the listeners interest. It's also interesting to watch the movement of your hands which serve as a replacement for the expressions on your face. You are very talented and could probably do voice-over work if you were looking for another career.

[@BustinCasts]

Excellent video sir. I've been playing with retired enterprise gear for about a year now and I've found many of your videos and series that you put together extremely helpful. I'm also an avid fan of your storefront and I will go out of my way to check your inventory first before shopping elsewhere. As a one time eBay seller who was very stressed over keeping my customers happy, I thank you for the support and value that you've provided me as your customer. I can't talk highly enough about you over here. Keep up the great work and thank you for doing what you do.

[@ArtofServer]

Thanks for your kind words! I appreciate your support and I'm glad you've found my videos helpful!

[@Thomas_P_aus_M]

Thanks for the summary of possible errors. As a complete beginner, I first watch all kinds of videos on this topic. And there's definitely a lot more that -you- I can do wrong. 🙂 🤔

[@ArtofServer]

Glad it was helpful!

[@Deleteyourself83]

Thanks, had 10 HGST SAS drives that where not showing up in my LSI HBA. Power disable was the culprit. Legend, thought my problem was about to get expensive but it cost some time and sellotape!

[@ArtofServer]

awesome! really glad to hear this video is starting to help people! :-)

[@Jorge2222]

Great points! One issue I've encountered with a 9600-16i card is it not recognizing SAS-2 drives, did the firmware upgrades and to this date it will not recognize SAS-2 drives. Very weird and luckily its mainly being used for SAS-3 and NVMe drives but still would like it to recognize SAS-2 drives as on occasion I need to get data off old drives. The card came with a system I got so not one of your cards for the record.

[@Jorge2222]

OK looking now at the compatible SAS drive list there are no SAS-2 drives listed... I guess RTFM time.

[@ArtofServer]

I haven't had that issue. However, which SAS-2 drives were you using? I've noticed some Seagate SAS drives have buggy firmware, and if the controller tries a different protocol (SAS-3 / SAS-4), it causes the drive to freeze up, instead of allowing it to negotiate to a matching protocol. Try different brands of drives to see if it is a universal problem or specific brand/model.

[@CloudiVist]

Excellent content supported by great camera work and great audio. Subscribed. Thank you.

[@ArtofServer]

You're probably new to the channel, so you don't know how much your compliment means to me! As a 1-person show here, who has zero experience with videography, I've spent a lot of time during this past year learning how to improve the image/audio, and production quality of my videos. Still at the beginning of my journey in this area with lots to learn, but your comment means a lot to me! thank you so much! I hope you find my other videos helpful! :-)

[@neail5466]

Absolutely, especially the filming and light.

[@R3fuge]

#10, missing power was it for me (hopefully, still need to order the cable) This is new to me, and I thought the HSB would be able to provide the power. Silly me. EDIT: Already had the power cable I needed, and now I'm up and running!

[@ArtofServer]

Glad this was able to help 🐱! You won't know what you don't know until you know 😆.

[@Dreamtwister2k]

Another phenomenally helpful video from one of the most helpful human being on the Internet. I'm still a novice so I appreciate the awesome support you gave me last year with my purchase. Knowing the rigorous test you put these cards through gives me peace of mind. I know where to go next time I need hardware for my next server project.

[@ArtofServer]

Thank you so much! It is always a pleasure to help one of my supporters! :-)

[@williamfinlay4403]

Thanks

[@ArtofServer]

Thank you so much for your support!

[@scottrogers8068]

Thanks for this - great video super helpful and very clearly explained. I worked through a lot of these but still can't get my drives to show up, would appreciate any pointers you can offer. I'm using a motherboard with integrated HBA controller (Supermicro X10SRH-CF which has an LSI 3008 with mini HD SFF-8643 connectors). I've checked the relevant jumper (JPS1) to make sure the controller is enabled, and the SAS indicator LED is pulsing green indicating the chip is powered. Checked and rechecked the cables (forward breakout, correctly seated). Drives appear to be spinning. I'm trying to identify whether the issue is the drives or the controller, but I can't find the controller BIOS settings anywhere; do these normally show up in the motherboard BIOS? The board has two SATA controllers, both of which are referenced in the "Advanced" tab of the BIOS, but there is no reference anywhere to the SAS controller. Any help greatly appreciated.

[@ArtofServer]

You need to enter the LSI BIOS ROM. Usually during POST, a message will show up referencing "Avago technologies" and you can press ctrl-c or ctrl-r to enter the LSI ROM program. This is provided your card has the LSI ROM installed. If not, you can try to install it first.

[@scottrogers8068]

@@ArtofServer thanks again. Flashed the BIOS and found the controller. Tested with a SATA forward breakout and it can see my SATA drives. SAS drives still not working, but strongly suspect the power disable "feature". I thought my used SAS drives were too old for this but looks like they do have that feature and I'm using normal PSU 6-pin to SATA power adapters (with 5 cables). Time to tape some pins.

[@dycedargselderbrother5353]

17:26 I discovered that SATA 1.0 drives with the ATA-7 command set are supported while ATA-6 ones are not. I get these figures in Linux via "smartctl -i /dev/sdX" (with the drives connected to a vanilla SATA ports in the cases of ATA-6), but there are probably half a dozen other ways to do it. ATA-6 corresponds to "Ultra 100", and these were basically old stock IDE drives retrofitted with a SATA bridge. I think some/many ATA-7 drives are bridged Ultra 133 IDE drives, but these still work, presumably because the ATA-7 and SATA 1.0 standards were concurrent. It's a little hard to tell what will work without some investigation. Probably the only 100% guarantee is the device lacking a Molex power connector. Regardless of disk size, I'm pretty sure all devices that are powered only by SATA connectors are ATA-7 or higher. For example, I had 80GB drives that were powered by SATA-only that work with LSI HBA cards. I also had 160GB (and maybe 250GB) drives with Molex power connectors that did not work with these cards.

[@ArtofServer]

Thanks for sharing that info. I'll have to look into that further.

[@dycedargselderbrother5353]

Addendum: Looking for the Molex power connector applies only to 3.5" drives. As for 2.5" drives, I don't have any particular strategies. I don't recall the PATA -> SATA transition behaviors for this form factor nearly as well as I do for the larger disks. I also don't recall actually seeing any ATA-6 SATA 2.5" devices but I haven't the largest sample size.

[@dycedargselderbrother5353]

I went through some of my remaining stock of old ATA-6 drives and have some more info. Actually, some are detected by LSA HBA and some are not. I can say at the very least, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST3160023AS 160GB with ATA/ATAPI-6 T13/1410D revision 2 is not detected while the WD Caviar SE WD800JD-40GBB2 80GB and WD2500JD-00HBB0 250GB are detected. Unfortunately, the WD drives don't report the ATA revision. It appears the last ATA-6 T13/1410D revision was 3a. Contrary to the speculation in my prior post, these non-detected Seagate drives do lack Molex power connectors, so that cannot be used as a compatibility guarantee. Oh, Seagate, always throwing a wrench in things.

[@johngalt8708]

14th reason: took me 8 hours to figure out. I executed the command: sudo hdparm -s 0 /dev/sd[id] because apparently some of them have this option enabled and -s 0 disables sleep.

[@ArtofServer]

Wait, so your drives were configured to power-on in standby but they wouldn't spin up when the controller probed the drives? what controller and drive model?

[@1234thenarrator]

There I was thinking about putting electrical tape over certain pins, reflashing firmware, updating Linux drivers. Before that, I followed tip #1 and wouldn't you know it, actually plugging in the cable worked.

[@ArtofServer]

LOL... I'm glad that tip helped you out! :-) Thanks for watching!

[@protox07]

I like your videos

[@ArtofServer]

Thank you for watching! :-)

[@jonathanbuzzard1376]

Another reason I have come across a couple of times is SAS-2 external JBOD's that just don't show up when connected to SAS-1 cards.

[@ArtofServer]

That's a good point. Actually, I didn't really go into external JBODs, but I find some of them a bit quirky where some drives may not show up, or upon reboot, some drives will disappear and some will come online, especially with very large arrays.

[@M1America]

Awesome video, this isn't information that is readily available. I think I actually ran into that kernel bug in my dellr710 running debian a couple years ago when I setup my server. I ended up being frustrated that it used to work on Ubuntu but when I switched my system to debian it would load the kernel driver but the drives wouldn't show. I ended up just leaving it all connected and waiting haha. I thought it just started working a week later but it was probavly a kernel update haha

[@ArtofServer]

Thank you! I hope this video will help people out when troubleshooting their LSI HBAs and storage. Was the Debian running kernel 5.8.x? That does sound like an kernel update fixed something...

[@M1America]

@@ArtofServer I do not know for sure but I believe so. This was around last christmas.

[@SanjayKumar-zc1wu]

i am using x570 motherboard with lsi connector and toshiba sas 12*4 tb hdd and its not detecting any help ? i am using windows so do i have to install lsi or it should detect directly?

[@ArtofServer]

Make sure your driver is installed and working correctly. Then watch my LSI HBA troubleshooting video. And then go through this video.

[@vaggeto]

Using unRAID, I removed a dead hdd yesterday, and added a couple others (and swapped out 2 pcie3 nvmes for pcie4) and cleaned out dust. Somehow on boot into unRAID, I can't see each of the drives on the p3 port of each SAS breakout cable. I have reseated both the breakouts at the lsi 9207-8i (I got from you on ebay) and at the drives with no change. Any ideas what would stop a single drive in each breakout? I updated bios which cleared my settings as well, so I'm not sure if I missed a setting as it has been a couple years since I messed with it. I indirected the board for missing capacitors etc and can't find anything.

[@ArtofServer]

That's a strange one. I don't think any BIOS settings would affect how the 9207-8i card would work. What happens if you swap the drive on the P3 port to the P2 port? Does the drive on P3 still not show up?

[@vaggeto]

@@ArtofServer I finally figured this out! I shuffled the drives around slightly, and I had a couple WD white label drives which disable themselves if they sense 3.3v coming through the power connector as some power saving feature. You have to bypass this, which I had done before on the safa connector but when I moved the drives they got moved to different power connectors. It's a common issue but just need in the case of someone getting a new drive, vs shuffling things around. So I wasn't getting any search results.

[@vaggeto]

@@ArtofServer Btw I did swap the drives on p2 and p3 and the same drives worked and didn't work so that ruled out the lsi or cable for causing the issue, thanks!

[@Waltkat]

Wish this awesome info applied to my situation. My Cisco UCS C240 M4 has 12 SAS drives attached to the controller and all 12 are seen and functional. The problem is, these drives are storage drives setup in a Raid 6 configuration and the server boots off of a couple of Intel SSD's that are setup in a Raid to protect the OS. These two SSD's are plugged into a couple of SATA sockets on a PCIe board, which is separate from the SAS controller. The BIOS does not show these drives as bootable. When I try to load Windows, the install gets to a point where it asks where to install Windows and neither of the SSD's are in the list. Matter of fact, the only thing on the list is the USB dongle where the Windows installer lives. And of course, Windows can't and shouldn't be installed there. Ah, the joys of servers.

[@ArtofServer]

The PCIe SATA controller needs to be compatible with the server in order to boot. And windows installer also needs driver for the SATA controller in order to see drives connected to it.

[@Waltkat]

@@ArtofServer Appreciate your response. The SATA controller is the original one that came with the server and it booted from the original SSD's that was installed when I bought it. The problem is, the Windows Server OS that was on those SSD's is password protected and I have no way of bypassing it (at least I don't know how) so I replaced the two SSD's with two different ones with a higher capacity and tried to install Windows 10. I may try Linux if I'm unsuccessful with the Windows install.

[@computersales]

The most obvious problem is always the easiest to miss.

[@ArtofServer]

Indeed! :-)

[@vinatron8075]

I have a question related to drives. I have seen these RDX Cartridges for backups. However the enclosure won’t work with normal drives and the drives from RDX cartridges won’t work in normal computers. I was wondering since I’ve seen some of you videos if you know the reason or at least would help me find out the reason and see if there’s a work around or if it’s a lost cause. I know it’s not recommended to mess with a backup media but as I tinkerer I would love to know why these disks are special is it a sector format magic or what. I’d love to work with you on this mystery because I see no one trying to solve it. Thanks for your videos they have helped me a lot.

[@ArtofServer]

Sorry, I don't know much about those RDX cartridges. Aren't those backup tape systems? Thanks for watching!

[@vinatron8075]

@@ArtofServer essentially it’s a HDD in a shock proof case that’s designed to be an alternative to tape backups. I’d be interested in doing some forensics on how they supposedly lock them to only working with their drives and no where else.

[@tristankordek]

🙂👍

[@ArtofServer]

Thanks!

[@PaulLemars01]

I've got a problem that's driving me insane. My host computer is a HPZ420 with a Xeon 6 core and 32GB of memory. PSU is stock 600W. The controller is an LSI 9200-8I. SSD drive for boot on SATAIII from motherboard. 7 2TB Seagate Constellation 'refurbs' connected. With all 7 drives powered up the machine will not post. It gets to HP BIOS splash screen and then locks. If I power down drive bay 3 and 4 it will post with either cold start or CTRL-ALT-DEL. Once it gets over the post and TRueNAS starts OS load I quickly power up the two drives and the boot continues perfectly, everything mounts and happy server. tests: Warm restart with 3 fingered salute and all 7 drives running but still locks up on POST. Power down drive bay 1&2 instead and leave bays 3&4 powered but still locks up on POST. Power down drives 5,6,7 instead and leave 3&4 powered but still locks up. Switch SAS cables so port 0 is now going to 5,6,7 and port 1 is going to 1,2,3,4, but still locks up on POST. If I goose the server by starting 3&4 after POST it will run for days. It's driving me crazy. I'm not expecting a reply but more of an opportunity to vent.

[@ArtofServer]

That's probably a power issue. HDDs use the 12V rail to drive the motors and during spin-up they draw a lot more power. You should check the PSU to see how many Amps you can pull on the 12V rail for the HDDs.

[@neail5466]

The channel should be "GOD of server" .. You saved my card's(h310) "A" lane. By any chance are you aware of the values of the 503 and 502 caps,? That would be a great help.

[@ArtofServer]

Sorry, I do not know the F for those caps. I usually just take them off another board. They are AC coupling capacitors, so you can probably look it up. For examples, on the PCIe lanes, it looks like between 75nF to 200nF. There's mention of 0402 package size and 100nF value as being recommended. I think for SAS-3 it is 10nF in 0402 and 12nF max, 4.7nF min.

[@neail5466]

@@ArtofServer Thanks a lot for your reply, Really appreciate your PCIe reference, can be helpful to study those designs. My recent observations revealed that there are not many types of caps probably an economical choice, should I be proven right in my assumption, you will be informed with all the details. Furthermore, the quality and the workmanship of my perc 310 are really an abomination of unaligned components, and untidy, untrimmed leads, even flux residues after 10 years, about originality it is, of course, got from a retired unit.... I recall you referring to the dell as a sturdy one now I wonder what if I had an LSI one. Thanks again, and I understand its hard to get new video topics often, still waiting for another binge.

[@neail5466]

@@ArtofServer could you please make a video on Megaraid bios "convert Raid /Non raid option" Explaining how the Megaraid nonraid compares to IT mode

[@_Funtime60]

Unfortunately this doesn't answer my problem. I have 4 SAS drives that WERE 520 byte, but I succeeded in reformatting them with sg_format and now MegaRAID reports them as 512. I was able to get them to show up in disk management once, but after I poked around with MS Storage Spaces they no longer show up in windows, but both sg_scan and MegaRAID still see them.

[@ArtofServer]

that sounds like a software problem, not a hardware issue. something up with MS storage spaces.

[@_Funtime60]

@@ArtofServer Yeah I figured as much. Thanks for the second, more educated, opinion though. I don't know what I'm doing until winging it breaks something or just never works and I have to spend days to months learning a new skill to fix it. Like how I'm trying to teach myself how to design an m.2 pcb so I can add WiGig to my desktop PC.

[@_Funtime60]

Luckily I find it fun... mostly

[@_Funtime60]

I fixed it I think, used reset-physical disks since they showed up int get-physicaldisk as starting and canpool false.

[@EdSchreibman]

"80% are from the cable" no waaaay not me ....,..,..... Yes, it was me. THANKS!

[@ArtofServer]

LOL glad it helped you out! :-)

[@decius596]

Can you add timestamps to this video?

[@ArtofServer]

The timestamps are already in the description. What's up?

[@decius596]

@@ArtofServer sorry I wasn't super clear. Somehow other videos have timestamps built directly into the player. Idk how they do it

[@rapjul]

@@ArtofServerI’m pretty sure you have to add a first timestamp of 00:00 to get the fancy chapters feature in KZbin to show up. Just add “00:00 Intro” above the first timestamp in the description.