Dell OEM-R R720XD Sata Problem

[mr.lj]

Hello people,
I am LJ and I have recently (not very recently Nov 2023) acquired a pretty cheap DELL OEM-R R720XD from Ebay.
It came filled with 12x DELL 3TB SAS drives and 128GB RAM.
I was super happy with my purchase and started doing some tests.
I quickly flashed the RAID Card (H710 mini D1) to IT Mode using fohdeesha's guide and installed Truenas on the drives, then ran some tests and was overall happy.
For caching I then purchased the rear backplane for the 2x 2.5" drives incl. all the cables, chugged 2 Crucial MX500 (500GB) SATA SSDs in it and tried installing TrueNas on there again.

This is where my issues began. I started seeing a lot of I/O Errors (will also attach the images) during the install and the progress wouldn't go over 50% (even after leaving it for over an hour). So i started to troubleshoot the machine.


First I put the drives into a different machine, checked SMART data and installed an OS to them, did some software raid stuff and all seemed fine. I mean after all i had just bought these drives fresh from Amazon so, DOA on 2 drives was very non likely yet not impossible.

I then tried the 2 drives in the front of the system, just kinda plugged them into the port and tried my luck (also removed all the other drives to avoid them influencing my tests) but was still getting a lot of I/O Errors.

I then tried a different 3.5" SATA drive that I had laying around (Ironwolf 6TB)... same results.

I reverted the flashing back to stock firmware and tried my luck that way but still getting stuck at 50%, this time not seeing any I/O Errors but I assume the raid card doesn't forward these to the installer.

I also tried installing all the updates I could find for the server, in the end using Update Yo Dell, foo! just to avoid any firmware issues but that also didn't resolve my problems.

Am I missing something here? Does the server not support SATA even though it is listed as supported and even though I see people all over the internet using their server with SATA drives just fine?
Is there a Firmware limitation with the OEM-R models that basically makes this a paperweight for me now?
I am lost at this point and really hope someone can help me.

Kind regards in advance

 

[CyklonDX]

i would be more keen to say its the disks errors, but you may have borked your firmware flash or raid controller (you can always get a cheap 9300 sas controller; h710p mini and such might be tricky for flashing).
Try completely removing firmware from your controller, and then flashing it clean. Most issues with sas controllers is because some bits are left from older/different firmware.

 

[mr.lj]

Thanks for the reply.

i would be more keen to say its the disks errors

That'd be so weird tho, as I have tried three drives and two models. I just 'refuse' to believe this being the issue.

Try completely removing firmware from your controller, and then flashing it clean. Most issues with sas controllers is because some bits are left from older/different firmware.

Can you maybe point me towards a resource to do that? For now I have used the D1REVERT script that comes with the tools to flash the card in the first place

 

[CyklonDX]

depending on the model i would advise using sas2flash.efi/sas3flash.efi tool instead // in terms of erasing i'm not sure on the level; broadcom lists sas3flsh –o –e -6 ~> but i don't think thats full erase. I think you'll find couple guides/threads here on the forums for flashing them.

 

[mr.lj]

Thanks a lot.
I will give it a look and see what I can find.
Maybe this helps.

really have been trying to figure this out for some time. But every time after 4 days of troubleshooting i tend to give up and am just discouraged. I also don't like the 'chugg parts at it' approach of just buying more parts in the hopes of something fixing it. Hence why I haven't bought any replacement Raid cards/ HBA or more drives.

 

[CyklonDX]

depending what you use (the daughter card, or normal sas controller)
i would just advise buying normal pcie lsi 9300-8i ~and cables depending on backplane you have~ its less of a headache than dealing with flashing daughter card or sas cards - but its just how much you value your time in my opinion.

 

[mr.lj]

I don't value my time too much here, as it's just a personal server, to store my BR collection, music, Photos and backups of OS'.
It's also gonna run some smart home stuff and maybe some other smaller things.

I just looked the LSI up. Does it only support 8drives? and would I therefor need 2 for sufficient capacity?

Edit: Forgot to mention my backplane: 0PGXHP

 

[CyklonDX]

if you mean the 9300-8i
The 8i stands for amount of connectors/lanes
4i is 4 internal lanes - single connector,
8i is 8 internal lanes - 2 connectors,
16i is 16 internal lanes - 4 connectors,

(The 9300 supports up to 1024 sata/sas devices)
Just keep in mind 720 backplane might use different (older) connector/s, the 9300 started using mini-sas sff-8643 while i think 720 backplane uses mini-sas sff-8087 ~> you can use 8087 to 8643 cables to accomplish that - to connect them.

 

[mr.lj]

I just erased the entire flash on the raid controller and then crossflashed the firmware again and it didn't work.
Actually looks worse now.

I guess I will just go with an LSI 9300-8i. I just need to find the correctly angle SFF-8087 cable without paying 100Eur/cable.

Thanks for your help

 

[mr.lj]

Quick Update:
Bought the LSI 9300-8i, hooked it up in my server, works flawlessly.
Seems to run just perfect.
Got the adapter cables from alibaba in the end. A seller there was the only source where I found the exact cable I needed.

thx a lot for the help.