help bios not seeing drives connected to sas card?

[kaitlin4599]

ok so i have a supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+ motherboard with dual 6 core v2 cpus and a dell perc H700 sas/raid card, i have 8 sata drives connected to the raid card. if i go into the raid cards config bios utility All of the drives show up as unconfigured however if i go into my bios i dont see any of the drives, also if i boot into linux i dont see the drives either im confused how do i fix this? if it matters these are also seagate 5400rpm sata desktop drives?

i should mention i dont plan to use raid mode at all but i do wanna use the cards cache if possible

quick edit did some reading on google looks like the h700 cant be flashed to it mode but yet linux mint still doesnt see the drives when i go into the linux disk utility what gives?

 

[ericloewe]

however if i go into my bios i dont see any of the drives,

How could it? AMI firmware is not setup to show that info. Hell, even Dell firmware won't show disks attached to SAS controllers in the system firmware setup menu. At most, if the card supports it and everything is correctly configured, the UEFI extension ROM on the card (if Dell ever shipped one) will hook into the existing menus and expose what amounts to the same options as the legacy card configuration utility without the hassle of a separate executable running independently of the system firmware setup menu.

i should mention i dont plan to use raid mode at all but i do wanna use the cards cache if possible

That's not a thing, for a variety of practical reasons. Especially because you're stuck with RAID unless you crossflash the card to IT mode - bad news is that nobody has figured out how to do so and documented the process. So yeah, you probably want to get rid of that controller.

if i boot into linux i dont see the drives either im confused

Assuming you mean that the OS doesn't see the disks but storcli or sas2ircu do see them, that's not surprising. It's a pure RAID controller, from the days before RAID controllers even pretended to do direct attach (LSI started doing that with the SAS2.5 generation).

 

[kaitlin4599]

@ericloewe when i power on the server it says press ctrl r to enter raid config utility in that utility i can see all the drives and they are listed as unconfigured but in windows i do not see the drives thats what i meant sorry for the confusion

 

[ericloewe]

Unconfigured == "I'll pretend these don't exist as far as the OS is concerned", in LSI SAS2 lingo.