Currently have a SAS HBA PCI Raid controller passed through to my TrueNas Scale VM in an attempt to turn 8 SAS hard drives into some nice NAS storage. The card is showing up in true nas but none of the SAS drives are. I bought a bunch of used enterprise drives and was prepared for some of them to be DOA, but it seems unlikely that none of them worked.
I did check the ebay listing for the “SAS” controller and I think it may just be a SATA controller with a SAS port. I’m also using some SAS cables with Sata power that might also be a point of contention? I’m not really sure and I’m looking for some advice that hopefully doesn’t involve buying more things.
Plug a sata drive in just to make sure the card is functional. Then my next guess would be the sas break out cables. I bought 5 different sets of sas break out cables before i actually got one set of cables that would work with sas drives. Most of them just have the physical plug but are not actually pinned for sas drives with sideband.
The reason I suggest that is because I bought a 9220-8i “P20 IT” on Newegg earlier this year and ran into the same issue. This was because the card wasn’t actually flashed into IT mode. If I went into the Bios I was able to see the drives and create a logical array which is not what I wanted.
I had to go through some hoops flashing mine as that particular model was not listed on LSI website but was actually a version shipped with IBM servers instead if I recall correctly. I did get through with flashing it but I recall the final steps required a UEFI shell when compared to the majority of guides I found online.
this is also a possibility, lots of IBM cards have SAS disk support disabled in firmware because it is an upcharge feature. a reflash with standard firmware will fix it.
