@Blacksmithforlife If you purchased the cabling from an online retailer, a link to that may help. What I believe Mr. Wendell is eluding to may be that you are using a reverse breakout cable instead of a forward breakout cable.
I’ll try and make this short, But essentially, the 2 different cables look pretty much the same but differ in how they are used to carry data. In your case, you would need a forward breakout cable. Foward Breakout cables are used to go from a HBA/RAID card and connect one of the ports on your LSI 9211-8i to 4 x sata drives. This is your configuration.
There is a less likely scenario that would use a reverse breakout cable and that would be to connect an sff-8087 port from a drive backplane to 4 separate SATA ports on your motherboard. In this scenario, you would have a chassis with a SAS backplane that you drives all slide into and then you use one of these reverse cables to connect the backplane directly to the motherboard without the use of an HBA/RAID card.
So although these 2 different cables may look physically the same, they cannot be used interchangeably.
Side Note: regardless of the type of cable you may or may not have, double check that everything is plugged in right. I’ll tell you right now that I have plugged in sff-8087 connectors upside down before and 4 of my drives on my 4 x 8087 port backplane wouldn’t show up. Also just double check all of your other cabling as well. Including power supply side SATA power. If your drives aren’t getting power but everything else is right, they still won’t show up.
Let us know if any of this helps. And don’t forget to post those pictures and links if you have them. Cheers
EDIT: So I just went down the rabbit hole of your last thread with the 9207-8i that you switched for this 9211-8i. I’m going to leave the rest of my response up just in case it has something in there that helps you. But I did notice one thing from the previous thread that I don’t know if you answered.
I believe he was referencing the old card (9207) but it is still a good troubleshooting step, have you tried using both of the ports on the 9211-8i?
I have also purchased numerous 9211-8i’s from that same ebay seller that you linked to and have yet to have an issue with any of them. I know you probably don’t want to test any more cables, but I’ve had fantastic results with cable matters SAS breakout cables here https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B012BPLYJC They’re relatively cheap so if you want to take a crack at different cabling again it wouldn’t break the bank.
Still let us know how everything goes.