ok, good. go to sas topology and see if you see the drives in that menu anywhere?
looking good. btw that card will get super hot and needs a lottttt of airflow over it to keep it cool
Yup, my fingers got a little burn moving it out to get a picture. I will check the topology and be back
For reference, here are the cables I originally ordered https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07CKX62L6
And just to rule out it being the cables I ordered these https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004KDO22K which should be here tomorrow
can you take some pics of your cabling setup? cable is pushed all the way into the card till it clicks?
https://photos.app.goo.gl/MyPTryoQ37fuXss86 ignore the fact it isn’t hooked up. The drive just keeps spinning so I disconnected it. Pardon the terrible lighting, my office doesn’t have overhead light so I had to use a flashlight.
I removed the cables and re-seated them multiple times to make sure they were connected (even heard a satisfying click).
The case is a fractal design r5 (cause I need a media drive bay on the front and all new cases seem to just be pure mesh). The cables are routed in through the rubber grommet area to the back and plugged in.
ok so lets do this. plug in all the power to all the drives, then plug one drive in with a sata cable to the motherboard to be sure the motherboard can see it.
shut down the computer
then without unplugging power to the hard drives, unplug the sata cable and plug in the sas cable and go back into ctrl+a and see if the drive can be seen?
I previously had 5 of the drives directly attached to the motherboard (limit of 6 sata ports on the motherboard, 1 of them being used for optical media) and they were working fine. Does it matter if the drives previously had something on them?
it shouldnt matter. i really suspect this is either a bad port or bad cable. these are the cables i bought for use with my 9207-8i that i just got for a server build
bought 2 of them and all my drives showed up correctly although one bay in the 5.25 to 8x2.5 adapter doesnt like to stay connected. not sure if bad cable there or if its just a bad back plate on the adapter.
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Those are the ones I ordered off amazon (just because with prime shipping it would get here faster than newegg).
Is there an option like auto spin updrives, enabled? Format option or drive list on the controller? BRB zzz
Sorry, had a power outage (very rare here, so haven’t bothered with a UPS… yet). forums appears to not like JPEG very much either as they usually cache images.
Not really much to add to what Wendell has brought to the table otherwise, I’m afraid 
No problem, thank you for the help!
Not that I saw. Currently at work but I will check afterwards.
I had a free moment at work, so more pictures of the BIOS https://photos.app.goo.gl/zUZM6GbcSTCLEZ3R6
As you can see there are a bunch of options for the spinup delay or other timings but no “auto spin updrives”. I also did not see any format option or drive list.
Just received the new cables and still the drives are not showing up. Anything else I can do to rule out it being a defective card?
Any strong opinions on using https://www.amazon.com/MZHOU-Controller-Expansion-Marvell-88SE9215/dp/B082D6XSZN/ ? At this point I just want something plug and play.
the mzhou will bottleneck becauise 8*170 mbyte/sec is greater than 1 gbyte/sec
Theres some people flashing the IBM M1015 into LSI 9211-8i on ebay. You could do one yourself and save some money. Its not super difficult. It roughtly doubles in price if you buy it pre-flashed like this one is.
I flashed my own and they’ve been solid.
ok. Is the LSI 9211-8i going to cause me the same trouble this 9207 has? Or should I just use the motherboard SATA ports and get a small 2 port expansion for PCI-E?