SAS SSDs fail to be recognized by LSI RAID cards

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
#1

Hi all,

I have been scratching my head for a while over some SSDs that are failing to be recognized by the RAID card and am curious of any thoughts as to what the cause may be.

The SSD in question is a Micron S650DC 400GB SAS3 drive. I have six of them, two of which were purchased brand new and four that were purchased, used, off eBay.

I have tried the drive in two different machines with three different RAID cards:

  1. Dell R730XD w/PERC H700 (I think)
  2. Lenovo TD340 w/ThinkServer RAID 500, aka LSI 9240-8i
  3. Lenovo TD340 w/LSI 9211-8i

In all cases, the RAID/HBA cards are known to work. The SSDs were mounted in OEM caddies and inserted into the stock backplane. All machines recognize SATA devices and, in the case of the Dell, also have numerous SAS HDDs connected and functioning as expected. However, when the Micron SSDs are inserted, while the power led on the caddy lights up green, the drive is nowhere to be seen in WebOS; it just doesn’t seem to be recognized by the cards.

I don’t have a great deal of experience with SAS drives, particularly SSDs, so I don’t know if there is some configuration I’m overlooking, or an incompatibility that I’m not aware of. Otherwise, I haven’t the slightest idea where to go from here.

I’ve searched a fair bit and come up pretty much empty. I did find a couple of posts in the unraid forums, with similar symptoms but not much in the way of resultion. Anyway, hoping someone on here might have an idea.

#2

Some SSDs freak out if a 3.3v rail is present, and some freak out if it isn’t present ( or something like that)
could be the root of your problem

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#3

In general I wouldn’t mix SAS and SATA on the same RAID card, either one or the other. Do they work if they’re the only device plugged into the RAID card?

Does the SSD appear in the harddrive list in the IPMI storage page?

#4

When I was originally setting up the server I did have only the SAS drives connected; the SATA drives were never part of the plan, they’re just standing in because I was impatient about getting the server going. And, should I get these drives to work, they will be the only ones connected.

I didn’t check on the Dell if the drives show up in IPMI and the Lenovo’s if fairly useless and doesn’t list any hardware.

#5

I wasn’t aware SAS drives can be affected by this PIN, especially when plugged into a SAS backplane, but a bit of googling, following your comment, has turned up some others with similar issues.

I don’t have any kapton tape, but will order some and give it a try and update once I’ve done so.

#6

Update with the solution to this issue:

I received a roll of Kapton tape and applied it to the first three pins, as outlined in numerous how-to posts, and the drives were recognized without issue.

So, it does appear to be the 3.3v rail issue suggested by @GigaBusterEXE. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

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