I've been running FreeNAS on an old HP Microserver for years now, and I finally decided to upgrade to something more "heavy metal". I'm just now starting to come up to speed on this type of hardware, so forgive me if I'm missing something obvious.
I settled on an HP DL380e G8 with the 12-bay cage in front. I just bought it and 2x 4TB SATA drives from eBay for now, but obviously wanted plenty of room for expansion. The server I bought did NOT come with a PCIe HBA, just the B120i built in to the motherboard. I made the assumption that, although the B120i only supports 6 drives (and only two of those at 6g) I could just start with that, and buy a "real" HBA (probably an H220?) whenever I decide to buy more drives.
The way I understand it, the 12-Bay cage is actually an active SAS expander, so it can drive all 12 drives from just two miniSAS cables. The onboard B120i has only one miniSAS port, so I ran a cable from that port to "SAS Port 1" (there are two) on the 12-bay breakout board. I made the assumption that this would activate the first so many (6?) of the drives in the cage. Perhaps this was a mistake.
The B120i is set to AHCI mode in the bios since I'll be using ZFS and don't want any hardware RAID functionality.
In both FreeNAS (FreeBSD) and Ubuntu Bionic, I'm getting drive-controller related errors. For example in Ubuntu I get lots of
in the kernel logs. The OS also doesn't see any of the drives in the cage. I've tried the drives in all different slots in the 12-bay, and even with no drives at all and get similar results.
I notice that if I only use the two SATA ports located on the motherboard (with some ssds I have laying around) and leave the miniSAS cable disconnected, I don't have any errors. I can read and write to those just fine.
My first thought is that I have a bad SAS 12-bay expander board. I was going to try and get the seller to RMA that, but I thought I would ask around first to make sure I'm not doing anything stupid. Is the 12-bay expander meant to ONLY work with both miniSAS cables? If so, would buying, for example, an H220 solve my issue?
Thanks in advance for your help!
I settled on an HP DL380e G8 with the 12-bay cage in front. I just bought it and 2x 4TB SATA drives from eBay for now, but obviously wanted plenty of room for expansion. The server I bought did NOT come with a PCIe HBA, just the B120i built in to the motherboard. I made the assumption that, although the B120i only supports 6 drives (and only two of those at 6g) I could just start with that, and buy a "real" HBA (probably an H220?) whenever I decide to buy more drives.
The way I understand it, the 12-Bay cage is actually an active SAS expander, so it can drive all 12 drives from just two miniSAS cables. The onboard B120i has only one miniSAS port, so I ran a cable from that port to "SAS Port 1" (there are two) on the 12-bay breakout board. I made the assumption that this would activate the first so many (6?) of the drives in the cage. Perhaps this was a mistake.
The B120i is set to AHCI mode in the bios since I'll be using ZFS and don't want any hardware RAID functionality.
In both FreeNAS (FreeBSD) and Ubuntu Bionic, I'm getting drive-controller related errors. For example in Ubuntu I get lots of
Code:
ata1: COMMRESET failed (errno=-32)I notice that if I only use the two SATA ports located on the motherboard (with some ssds I have laying around) and leave the miniSAS cable disconnected, I don't have any errors. I can read and write to those just fine.
My first thought is that I have a bad SAS 12-bay expander board. I was going to try and get the seller to RMA that, but I thought I would ask around first to make sure I'm not doing anything stupid. Is the 12-bay expander meant to ONLY work with both miniSAS cables? If so, would buying, for example, an H220 solve my issue?
Thanks in advance for your help!