I recently bought a used tape drive, the seller also included a Dell SAS 6Gbps HBA Card and a cable. (Mini-SAS SFF-8088 26P to 4 X SAS SFF-8482 I think)
However the led on the port doesn’t light up and the card doesn’t seem to recognize the tape drive. I’m pretty sure that the cable is fine, but even after trying all 4 connectors on the tape drive and both ports on the HBA card it doesn’t light up and won’t get recognized.
There is 1 led on HBA card next to the heatsink that blink green once per second. I couldn’t find any information in the manual about it, but I assume it’s fine?
Windows recognizes the card correctly. The driver is from 2017 according to the details. I’m pretty sure that this is not OS related, but I’ve tried all of this with windows 10. I’ve also rebooted my machine whenever I changed the connector/port.
Given that I have 4 connectors on the cable I would assume that the led would at least light up as amber based on the description of the led status in the manual.
Is there any hope or is the HBA card just broken? The previous owner used everything with no problem and everything was packaged extremely well. I also don’t see any ripped components or anything.
Some specs that might be useful:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3800x
Mainboard: Asus x570 prime pro (latest bios, tried the 2nd and 3rd 16x slot, also tried setting the port to Gen 3)
You’re asking for help about a used tape drive, which is not showing up. Can you please share with us what the make and model of that drive is?
I assume it’s a SAS tape drive (hence the SAS card). The cable to connect require power input. Did you provide power (you’re not saying)? What kind of power cable did you use (I assume a SATA connector from your PSU)? Does the tape indicate anything about receiving power?
If you boot in BIOS mode (instead of UEFI) you should be able to enter the SAS card setup. Does the tape drive show up there?
I’m not familiar with tape drives, but I know that there are issues powering SAS HDDs with the regular SATA power connectors. It’s possible to work around this problem connecting the SAS HDD with molex power cable from the PSU and a molex to SATA adapter cable. If you have one of those it may be worth a quick try.
Hey, thanks for the kind welcome and quick reply, much appreciated.
It’s an IBM LTO Ultrium 6-H Tape Drive. I’m pretty sure that they usually come with a adapter in the back with a SFF-8088 SAS connector, but mine doesn’t have it. Mine has the bare SFF-8482 connector directly from the main PCB.
The cable which I’m using has a molex female connector on each SFF connector and it is plugged in via my PSU.
The tape drive doesn’t show up in the setup screen (I assume it would show up in the “SAS Topology” menu). The status of the card is “disabled” tho, but I don’t really see a way to enable it. Could that be the problem? I changed the configuration to “BIOS & OS” and now it says that the adapter is enabled. It still doesn’t show the drive tho. I just ordered a new cable just to be sure.
