SOLVED dl380 gen 9 12 LFF

[thegreek1]

Hi,

not 100% a truenas issue but a general dl380 g9 12 LFF hardware issue seeing the drives in bay 2. I do have the 12G p840ar card that is connected but I can only see the first drive in bay 2 and not the rest. Bay 2 is defined as HDD drives 9, 10, 11, and 12. Is there any reason why the last 3 drives won't come up?

 

[jgreco]

Is there any reason why the last 3 drives won't come up?

Yes, of course. It's not compatible. Please read

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

Replace it with an LSI HBA of appropriate model and it should then work.

 

[thegreek1]

Yes, of course. It's not compatible. Please read

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

Replace it with an LSI HBA of appropriate model and it should then work.

I do appreciate your response and thank you for it. This was more a hardware question on the 380 g9. I know that *nas with zfs does not play nice with hardware controllers.

 

[jgreco]

This was more a hardware question on the 380 g9

Okay, but the answer is the same regardless. It isn't showing up because the card you're using is intended for RAID, and the FreeBSD/Linux drivers for the P840ar are problematic when used with this off-brand PMC-Sierra piece of junk controller. It isn't expected to work and is in fact known not to work.

 

[thegreek1]

I guess I failed to communicate this properly. I was hoping someone with good knowledge of the HP dl380 g9 server would be able to help answer the hardware question of not having the box 2 bay 2 drives 10, 11, and 12 not working. MyTruenas scale is running fine on my Lenovo p700 with a LSI 9200 8i card based on a previous thread with your recommendations.

 

[jgreco]

Oh, so you're just asking if HP might suck somehow? The answer there is yes...

Dell does this kind of crap much less often than HP in my experience, but both are known to make highly customized cable assemblies for their servers, and these can go wrong if they are not used as intended. It also makes for wicked hard debugging over the Internet. To give you an idea what I mean, take a look at this eBay listing for your controller that includes a cable harness.

Now if you look at the two cables plugged into the controller, you see that there is one that fills out the full width of the connector ("Port 2") and another that is only half-width ("Port 1"). If you follow these out to the connectors, you see the wider one services two connectors.

Because some of the SAS lanes on Port 1 have been abandoned, it might not be odd that they could have been abandoned in firmware or disabled by configuration in order to prevent the RAID card from complaining about or wasting time probing them. So the very first thing I would do if I were you would be to make certain that your cabling is correct. I can't say for certain that Port 2 is supposed to have the dual cable on it (I'm basing all this on an eBay photo after all), but if Ports 1 and 2 got inadvertently switched around, I can see lots of room for trouble here.

You may also want to completely reset your controller to see if it suddenly picks up the "missing" drives.

 

[thegreek1]

Hi, thanks for all your help! It would appear that the root of my trouble was that the backplane for the bay 2 was not sitting flush with the hard drives. I had to gently push it in and now the hard drives are appearing. I've upgraded the hardware raid p840ar card from v3 to v7. Things are looking smooth right now. Up next to see if I can retrieve my data from a disk from my old freenas box then migrate the data. After that, when my pcie m.2 adapter card comes in, I need to move my system from the hard disks over to the 2x1tb m.2 drives for the OS and keep the hard disks for storage. I say about a day's work :)

 

[jgreco]

I've upgraded the hardware raid p840ar card from v3 to v7.

Do not use a P840ar card with TrueNAS. It is incompatible. See previous link.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Just to elaborate on what "incompatible" means here (and in equivalent cases): Although things might seem to work for a while, there is tremendous risk that one wday they will stop doing so. So a "but it has been working for me until now" is worth nothing. At the end of the day one has to understand what risk means: the fact that an undesired event may eventually materialize. So there is a (rather theoretical) possibility that things run well for 20 years. But there is also a probability that they won't. It's all about one's willingness to accept that risk.

 

[jgreco]

Just to elaborate on what "incompatible" means here (and in equivalent cases)

Some of which is discussed in the previous link. Usually I do go on and on a bit more about this but I was in a hurry when I wrote that, special thanks to @ChrisRJ for wearing my Grinchly cap for a few moments.