H710 Mini 8087 to sata fanout cable not working

[gslavov]

I have a R320 server with an H710 mini card in it. There is a SAS 8087 cable connected to the backplane with 4 SAS drives that work just fine.

I tried to add two additional drives using the SAS-B connector on the board with a SAS mini to Sata fanout cable and the drives are not detected.

The drives are Samsung Evo 850 if that makes a difference and I tried two different fanout cables (a Chinese one from eBay and an HP one from one of my other servers). Has anyone come across this issue an how did you solve it? Does Dell do anything silly with pinouts that requires their specific cables?

 

[gregsachs]

Are you sure your cable is a forward cable and not a reverse? Reverse cable is 4x sata motherboard ports->1 8087 port, forward is raid/mb 8087 port ->4x drives

 

[gslavov]

The cable is definitely forward, as in the Chinese one could be anything despite what the description says but the HP one works fine in my other server.

All I can think of is that Dell have deliberately changed the pinout as they sell two different mini-sas to sata cables (XP00F & H3YKR) which are apparently not interchangeable, one being for the SAS-B connector and one for the onboard sata.

 

[Dawg10]

Check Page 26 of the 'Dell PowerEdge R320 System Owner's Manual'... I believe you need to set the 'Embeded SATA' to RAID mode (default: AHCI); this kicks in the embedded S110 controller. NB: I'm not sure changing the setting will impact your H710 array. I have read comments that doing this with a H310 installed causes data loss.

I honestly thought you can't run the S110 and a {H310 or H710} at the same time but I can't find that documented anywhere.

 

[gslavov]

Thanks for the suggestion but the embedded S110 controller has its own port (Sata A-D) and the BIOS settings for that are independent of the two ports (SAS-A and SAS-B) for the hardware raid contrller (be that H310 or H710).

There is either a setting that disables the SAS-B port that I haven't found yet or there is something fishy with the fanout cables that I am using and I can't for the life of me figure out what it is.