LSI 9341-4i doesn't see any drives

[nabsltd]

I'm having terrible luck with my TrueNAS test box and HBAs. I have a few in the drawer that I pulled from working machines. The first card I tried was a 9361-4i (not the best for TrueNAS, but it's just a test setup), and it appears to be completely dead, as it won't post in any of 3 different motherboards.

The next was a 9341-4i, which although currently in IR mode, it does JBOD and can be flashed to IT. It posts fine, BIOS config comes up and works in both legacy and UEFI mode, but it doesn't see any attached drives. I'm using a breakout cable to 4 SATA data connectors, and have updated the BIOS to the latest version. The drives work fine connected to the on-board SATA, and the cable works with a different HBA (which I can't use for this TrueNAS test as I had to borrow it from a working server). And, other, known working cables don't help. I even tried the 9341 in the server from which I borrowed the HBA, and it still couldn't see any disks. There are no jumpers in place on the (very few) headers on the 9341.

So, I think I have ruled out the motherboard slot, the breakout cable, and the drives. There does not appear to be anything physically wrong with the SFF-8643 socket on the card.

Any ideas?

 

[Rain]

Are you sure your using forward SFF8643 to 4xSAS/SATA breakout cables and not reverse cables?

Yes, there are two variants of breakout cables, and yes it's confusing. This is the case for the older 8087 cables too.

Forward SFF8643 (or 8087) to 4xSAS/SATA breakout cables fan a single SFF on an HBA to 4 individual drive connectors
Reverse SFF8643 (or 8087) to 4xSAS/SATA breakout cables are used to connect a SFF8643 connector on passive backplane to 4 individual SAS/SATA ports on a motherboard/HBA.

If you're truing to use a reverse SFF8643 to 4xSAS/SATA cable to connect from an HBA to 4 drives, it won't work.

For example, the following two cables are different (CableMatters chosen at random, no particular reason):

https://www.cablematters.com/pc-37-157-internal-mini-sas-to-4x-sata-forward-breakout-cable.aspx

Internal Mini-SAS to 4x SATA Reverse Breakout Cable

Cable Matters Mini-SAS to 4x SATA Reverse Breakout Cable connects 4 discrete SATA ports on a RAID controller host to a Mini-SAS SFF-8087 multi-lane port on a backplane.

www.cablematters.com

 

[nabsltd]

Are you sure your using forward SFF8643 to 4xSAS/SATA breakout cables and not reverse cables?

As I said, swapping in a different HBA into the same motherboard with the same cable and same hard drives showed the drives, so I'm pretty sure it's the right cable.