Broadcom HBA 9500-8i troubles

[deadpete]

Hi folks,

I have recently purchased a Broadcom HBA 9500-8i card, and the ultimate goal is to setup a RAID5 array.
Motherboard: MSI X570 Unify (latest BIOS), CPU AMD Ryzen 5700G (3rd gen), 16GB RAM, system disk Seagate Firecuda 4TB (NVMe 4.0)
Connected drives: 4x Seagate Ironwolf 18TB
OS: Debian 11.2 (Bullseye), drivers for the card (mpt3sas) installed from the CentOS package modified for Debian per instruction in the Broadcom documentation.

When setting the BIOS to CSM (legacy), the HBA init screen shows up, but after initializing and recognizing the disks there is just a message that the initialization was successful. The HBA display also says "Security hard". No prompt for RAID management is displayed. If I try to press Ctrl-H, or Ctrl and some other key while initialization run, the boot hangs.

Setting the BIOS to UEFI, the card shows up in the list of UEFI devices, I can open the card, and the disk information is also displayed. But no means of defining a RAID array whatsoever.

Then I installed the command line utility storcli64 (the latest version). I updated the BIOS and firmware to the latest one (01/22/2022) with storcli64. The update was successful.

Most show commands work, but almost any other command that I run to change something, e.g. defining a RAID array, ends with the following error message:

CLI Version = 007.2103.0000.0000 Dec 08, 2021
Operating system = Linux 5.10.0-11-amd64
Controller = 0
Status = Failure
Description = Un-supported Command

If there is somebody who knows what's going on here, I would be very grateful to get some information how I can get this stuff up and running.

Best regards,

Peter

 

[Rand__]

Ok, let me try again

The hardware you purchased is a HBA. a HBA will directly attach drives to the OS. It is not a Raid controller. The only thing you can do with it that is raid-like is software raid in the OS of your choice.

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previous post:

The first sentence already leaves me confused...

You buy a latest gen SAS HBA to run a Raid5 - on 4 Sata drives?

You sure you don't want to trade that to me for an actual raid controller?

Kidding aside, I am not perfectly sure that the hardware will not be capable of what you want to do unless you will run a software raid ...
so that might explain why you dont see the raid bios you are expecting...

 

[deadpete]

Hi Rand__

You're absolutely right, I got the wrong product. I sent my requirements to the reseller, and got this, didn't give it a thought. I will replace it with a similar RAID card.

My choice of drives and card is the need for maximum storage, and better performance than what the built in chipset can achieve. It's better to offload the work to a dedicated controller, than to load the CPU and other parts of the system. Those components will be busy enough. The RAID5 is a trade off, I could go for RAID10, but I consider the risk of a 2 drive failure happening at the same time is far less probable than a complete controller failure. I do not need absolute top speed, but reliability and good performance. SAS drives in this setup would be prohibitively expensive, and completely meaningless.

There's no reason to use software RAID, then I could as well hook up the drives to the AMD controller.

Oh, well. You learn something every day...

Thanks for pointing my nose in the right direction.

Best regards,

Peter

 

[Rand__]

Welcome

But there is no need to get the latest and greatest for a few spinners unless you dont care about the money
For the 4 drives even an old SAS2 Raid controller would be sufficient.

 

[deadpete]

Hi Rand__

It's a rig with a long lifetime. Once setup, nobody will touch it as long as it's up to the task. At least 5 - 6 years. Better make it as good as possible now, then it can age gracefully in peace.

Thanks for your input.

Peter

 

[fjstore]

Hi Rand__

It's a rig with a long lifetime. Once setup, nobody will touch it as long as it's up to the task. At least 5 - 6 years. Better make it as good as possible now, then it can age gracefully in peace.

Thanks for your input.

Peter

9560-16i 9660-16i