This is my first post to this forum and i have an issue.
I have 24 x18 18 TB drives in an CSE-846E1-R900 supemicor case and non of them get detected.
My HBA is an LSI 3008 and the disks work find in another case but i don’t have 24 slot available in that case.
Do you have any tip i can try to make it work or can recommend me a case (i only have on HBA atm with x2 mini SAS ports).
SAS SSDs and HDDs get detected without a problem but any SATA device just refuses to work.
I’ve tried it with a number of different types of drives and capacities.
This is gonna sound silly, but do the SATA drives actually plug into the backplane?
Some drive trays have different holes for “SATA” and “SAS” where the SATA is set back a half inch/ centimeter.
This so so you can add an interposer to SATA drives, so they work more like SAS drives.
You should not need this interposer, and so can screw the drives in to the SAS holes, if that is a difference?
I’m Googleing the case now for other ideas in the mean time
quote from supermicros website
SAS or enterprise SATA HDD only recommended
Physically they connect
I’ve tried an way older HBA in the mean time. It detects 22 drive (odd) but only as 2TB drives
Do you know what version of backplane you have for the case? When you plug a >2TB SAS drive into the CSE-846E1-R900 while using the LSI 3008, does it show as having more than 2TB of space?
It’s possible that either the SAS expander on the backplane or the older HBA are limiting you to <2TB of space on the drives depending on your answer to that last question
At any rate I wouldn’t trust my data to the backplane you currently have, I would get a TQ backplane without the expander and just deal with have to have 6 mini sas connections to the backplane.
Yes, the backplane is the large PCB right behind all the drives that they plug into. The SAS expander is a chipset on that PCB that “consolidates” the 24 drives signals down to the one (or two if you count the failover connection) mini sas connection.
The TQ backplane is a backplane for that case that doesn’t have the SAS expander on it, due to this it has 24 individual connections that need connected, and thus a monster HBA is needed.
For SAS expander backplanes, the specific chipset and firmware revision on it need to be compatible with your HBA + firmware revision in order for it to work correctly, it can be hit and miss combining the two. I’d be willing to bet if you got the appropriate supermicro branded hba, everything would be working properly because they put in the work to the firmware to make sure the two are compatible.
