LSI 9200-8E and Sans Digital TowerRAID TR8M+B - 8 Bay eSATA?

[Atarres]

I was hoping someone would have an answer for this. I have both and connected, but I am unable to get the drives detected at the hardware level or software level. As I have 2 enclosures each having eSata ports each, I only needed a SAS-eSata cable to connect to the enclosures. My assumption is I am doing something wrong. Here's what I've done so far.

Checked the cables (have a spare I tried with) swapped the cables into the other port (same results).

Checked that the connectors were seated correctly in the card.

I flashed the LSI card FW to an IT version to make sure I can run JBOD functions (this much I am familiar with as I have a number of Perc H200 (crossflashed to 9211-8i) and LSI 9211-8i doing the same thing (I run ZFS and Stablebit workloads on other setups I have).

Really hoping this card is not a dud, only external SAS card I have, and it is brand new. No errors are coming down from it. However my enclosures are not registering a connection either. Hopefully someone has run into this before and can assist in troubleshooting this.

 

[sullivan]

I think that's a SATA port-multiplier based enclosure. There are two esata ports on the back, and I believe each one goes to a 1-to-4 port multiplier on the back plane.

SAS controllers, in general, won't work with SATA port multipliers. If a SAS HBA is working in SATA mode it expects a single disk per channel.

To troubleshoot, you might try connecting one of the enclosures to a port-multiplier capable SATA controller. Onboard Intel SATA ports generally don't work with port-multipliers either. You may need a 2-port Silicon Image, Marvel, or Asmedia based card to test.

 

[Atarres]

Thanks. That is what I'm concerned about. The enclosures do work as they were part of an array I used to have. I was in the process of moving them to a new machine. They came with RocketRaid 642L cards and work just fine with those. I was hoping to use a better storage controller and I had these LSI's I got from work (about to get tossed so I gave them a new home ).

The description for the LSI 9200-8E states up to 512 devices can be connected to it. It seems to be implied it would have some kind of port multiplier aspect hence why I went with it. I found 0 documentation on whether it supports or does not support these types of enclosures. The goal was to get the LSI card going for the best performance vs the RocketRaid 642L card.

 

[sullivan]

In the world of SAS host adapters and interconnect, there's a different type of device called a SAS expander that lets a single controller fan out to multiple drives.

It's not a very good analogy, but a SAS expander is kind of like a network switch that allows any port to talk to any other port with multiple controllers and drives. A SATA port multiplier is a bit more like a USB hub, it only has a single master port and the throughput is limited to a single port spread across the downstream devices. The two protocols are very different and not compatible.

That said, if your RocketRaid card is working reliably then you are probably getting about the maximum performance you are going to see with those enclosures. With a port multiplier, you won't get more than a few hundred MB/s spread across all of the drives. Not bad if you are using them for backups or media storage, but probably not good enough for e.g. VM storage.

The LSI 9200 cards are still well supported with good performance and reliability. Don't throw them out.

 

[Atarres]

Yea on that machine not looking to run VM workloads. I do have that set up, I thought it was possible to run these against the enclosures. And yea no intentions of getting rid of them. They are solid that much I know. Sounds like this is gonna be a non-starter to get it working. Your analogy explained it and was solid. Makes tremendous sense now that I think about it. Many thanks, hopefully this thread helps others looking at the same things. I'll use the RocketRaids in the interm until I can engineer a SAS expander or buy one. Any suggestions for that?

 

[Terry Kennedy]

I'll use the RocketRaids in the interm until I can engineer a SAS expander or buy one. Any suggestions for that?

Yes - use SAS drives, not SATA ones, behind SAS expanders. Do a search here for resets for everybody (or click this hotlink) to see what I've said previously about the issue.