SAS madness

[why you no work computer]

I have encountered some problems with some hardware, which i purchased in a hurry from Ebay as there was few units left. The purpose of the system is to run a NAS from and have visualization on the system, so the system which i choose needed to have some power, and the ebay listing seemed perfect. There was not much time to do research and what i gathered from the research on all the components but seemed to meet a fairly good standard.

 

The hardware which i purchased can hopefully be seen here  http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/141843022055?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2648&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT 

 

The problem which i am encountering is that the system uses a perc6/i raid controller (supposedly), for all the hard drive bays at the front. The raid controller only supports raid 1 and raid 0, and has no ability to pass the hard drives directly through, (if this was a perc6/i it would support raid 0, 1 , 5, 6 and 10 but there is none of these options even with 12 drives ), additional the RAID controllers max HDD size is 2 TB and i have loads of 3TB. I was original going to use UNRAID as it seemed to suit my needs best. UNRAID does not use raid cards but uses instead uses some software magicery for drive protection. the thing is i all the hard drive bays on the front run directly through the RAID controller VIA SAS (SFF-8484) cables, and there is no reasonable way of connecting any other way. 

 

I have being doing a fair bit of research to try finding a SAS (SFF-8484 - preferably) to pci card which is not RAIDed. I can not seem to see any on the market which just pass the drives through to the OS. Is the card i am looking for a real thing or am i barking up the wrong tree. I know i am going to have to buy some sort of hardware to fix this problem, but i can not seem to find what i need to fix this problem. Can anyone suggest any hardware to fix the problem which i have, 

 

thanks 

 

Edit

 

so far i have had a look around for HBAs, i can not seem to find any that are suitable with the SFF-8484. the only ones that are this standard or out of stock. 

 

i am going to try and install windows on the server, i hope i might be able to update the bios on the RAID cards (or what ever its called) to allow at least 3TB hard drives and other raid types (if the cards are perc6/i) this may make the server at least usable for storage, and the plans of using URAID may change to another OS if the RAID cards are used.  

 

i will try to keep this thread updated. 

 

after thought, might not be able to load windows with only 32MBs of Vram. This server does have IPMI but not sure how to use it, more research needed

 

[mikat]

1 minute ago, why you no work computer said:

I have encountered some problems with some hardware, which i purchased in a hurry from Ebay as there was few units left. The purpose of the system is to run a NAS from and have visualization on the system, so the system which i choose needed to have some power, and the ebay listing seemed perfect. There was not much time to do research and what i gathered from the research on all the components but seemed to meet a fairly good standard.

 

The hardware which i purchased can hopefully be seen here  http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/141843022055?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2648&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT 

 

The problem which i am encountering is that the system uses a perc6/i raid controller (supposedly), for all the hard drive bays at the front. The raid controller only supports raid 1 and raid 0, and has no ability to pass the hard drives directly through, (if this was a perc6/i it would support raid 0, 1 , 5, 6 and 10 but there is none of these options even with 12 drives ), additional the RAID controllers max HDD size is 2 TB and i have loads of 3TB. I was original going to use UNRAID as it seemed to suit my needs best. UNRAID does not use raid cards but uses instead uses some software magicery for drive protection. the thing is i all the hard drive bays on the front run directly through the RAID controller VIA SAS (SFF-8484) cables, and there is no reasonable way of connecting any other way. 

 

I have being doing a fair bit of research to try finding a SAS (SFF-8484 - preferably) to pci card which is not RAIDed. I can not seem to see any on the market which just pass the drives through to the OS. Is the card i am looking for a real thing or am i barking up the wrong tree. I know i am going to have to buy some sort of hardware to fix this problem, but i can not seem to find what i need to fix this problem. Can anyone suggest any hardware to fix the problem which i have, 

 

thanks 

 

 

 

can you show us pics of the inside?

[why you no work computer]

21 minutes ago, mikat said:

can you show us pics of the inside?

here is a some images of the internal components

system out of the box (may notice raid cards unplugged)

 

 

raid cards

 

bottom of the raid card, with the sas connectors 

 

 

system over view

 

some images of the SAS connectors connecting to the back of the hard drives (not that good)

[why you no work computer]

BTW i know there is SATA ports on the motherboard, but i can not use the with the drive bays on the front

[H4nn3s]

You should look for a HBA Card, and not a RAID Card. But the only ones I know use SFF 8087

[why you no work computer]

21 minutes ago, H4nn3s said:

You should look for a HBA Card, and not a RAID Card. But the only ones I know use SFF 8087

i have had a look around, there is various SAS HBA Cards, but i can not find any non raided SFF8087 cards. Most of the cards are mini SAS and i don't think you can adapt them to the SFF8087 connector

 

thanks for the suggestion

[why you no work computer]

19 hours ago, H4nn3s said:

You should look for a HBA Card, and not a RAID Card. But the only ones I know use SFF 8087

I have done some more research since yesterday, it looks like there is no hope of getting a pci card HBA which has SFF 8087, there majority of cards which have this connector are PCI X (found on some servers). The best hope will proberbly to be to get a conversion cable to a newer standard of SAS (here is one I found: http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sas_cables_adapters/8784-05M.asp) and get another HBA card for that standard. this will probably be my best bet to use the drive bays at the front

[why you no work computer]

8 minutes ago, why you no work computer said:

I have done some more research since yesterday, it looks like there is no hope of getting a pci card HBA which has SFF 8087, there majority of cards which have this connector are PCI X (found on some servers). The best hope will probably to be to get a conversion cable to a newer standard of SAS (here is one I found: http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sas_cables_adapters/8784-05M.asp) and get another HBA card for that standard. this will probably be my best bet to use the drive bays at the front

i have found what I think is a suitable HBA card, i just hope that when i get them there is no compatability issues 

https://www.loveofficestuffs.com/pgProduct.cfm?Product=20420_156_2313925-Lenovo_SAS_Controller_PCI_Express_2_0_x8_Plug_in_Card_2_Total_SAS_Port_s_2_SAS_Port_s_Internal

[H4nn3s]

4 minutes ago, why you no work computer said:

i have found what I think is a suitable HBA card, i just hope that when i get them there is no compatability issues 

https://www.loveofficestuffs.com/pgProduct.cfm?Product=20420_156_2313925-Lenovo_SAS_Controller_PCI_Express_2_0_x8_Plug_in_Card_2_Total_SAS_Port_s_2_SAS_Port_s_Internal

You can try it, but on the site there is a compatibility list, which means it might not work.

[why you no work computer]

i will tell you if this fix works between the 5 may and the 5 of June due to the long shipping times of the controller

[thomas_fowler]

I have kinda lost access to "why you no work computer", i have no clue what email i signed up to it with, so i have abandon it and moved to this older account which I had.

 

The HBA card and the adapter cable has arrived. when i first installed the HBA card in to the computer along with the cable, I installed 1 HDD. That was picked up with the correct size. When i installed the second hard drive, it was not picked up, but the first drive was still there. A few restarts later and the problem still persisted, so i moved where the cable from the HBA was plugged in to the back plane on the case. i moved the drives around every bay in the case, and the HBA card could not detect them. All the drives still worked as i checked them after putting them in all the positions. i then put the cable from the HBA back to where it started, and i still could not detect any drives.

 

i attempted to change the settings in the HBA card but ran out of time. does any one have a idea why it would appear at the beginning but it will no longer appear, or could it be a configuration problem with the HBA card.

[leadeater]

@thomas_fowler Couple of things to note:

• You would need to firmware update those SAS cards you currently have to enable greater than 2TB support, which also tells me that system is super old. The hardware spec also does too.
• Not trying to be a downer but for the price on that listing there are systems at that same price of much newer generation hardware on ebay
• What SAS connector type is on the HDD backplane, SFF-8484? Looks like it from one of the pictures but hard to tell which makes me wonder how you are using that Lenovo SAS card.

One thing you could do is detach the SAS HDD backplane, not required to physically hold disks in place, and move it back enough to directly attach SATA connectors and power to each disk manually using SFF-8087 to 4x SATA. It looks like the front fans are powered off this else I would say just removed it. You could then buy two already IT flashed LSI 9211-8i/IBM M1115/IBM M1015 off ebay, very common and cheap.

 

I can't really explain why you could see the disk during the first attempt but I don't know exactly what you were doing and how everything was cabled at the time etc. One thing that is important to know is that SAS disks and ports are dual path but SATA disks are not so you have to be careful how you cable these systems else SATA disks won't show up in HBA/RAID cards if only the secondary path on the port is active.

 

Wish I had found this post sooner since I would have recommended not to buy those extra SAS cards you got, the price was also higher than you should have paid, and suggested you purchase a completely different system off ebay instead. The cost of SAS cards and SAS cables etc to get that system to work would be nearing the price of a complete system anyway. I also really don't think it is worth trying to get such and old system to work anyway.

 

Something like one of these listing plus a case to put them in would have been much better, you could even put these in that case you have now:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-S5520HC-Server-Motherboard-LGA-1366-2x-E5506-7-QC-CPU-48GB-12x-4GB-DDR3-/252380732333?hash=item3ac3105bad:g:aYYAAOSwuAVWxQq5

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-S5520HC-Server-Mboard-LGA1366-Dual-CPU-2-4GHz-12GB-E26045453-I-O-Plate-Fan-/361537110565?hash=item542d4a8225:g:jDAAAOSwxp9W7EJO

 

[thomas_fowler]

since my last post, i have played around with the cards and cable a bit, tried them in different configs and stuff. for some reason which i can not explain, the HBA card has started detecting all the drives which i have installed. the drives are being detected at the correct size and are being transferred to the OS ok. 

 

i would say that this post is closed since my original intentions have been achieved.  (i can not end the thread, i still can not find the  email i signed the original account up with)