Noob needs help: LSI 9201-8I not detecting most drives

[Diverge]

I picked up a LSI 9201-8i from ebay, and flashed it to the latest 9211-8i firmware/bios, but for some reason it won't detect most hard drives I attach to it.

For example;
It will detect an old WD WD2500KS (250GB)
It will detect an old WD WD2000 (200GB)
It won't dectect any of my old seagate barracuda 7200.8 drives (250GB)
It won't detect WD WD6400AACS (640GB)

I've tried multiple systems (Intel DH61AG, Asrock Z77E-ITX). It's not the drives, as they work fine off onboard Intel controllers. I doubt it's can be the cables (0.5m 30AWG Internal Mini SAS 36pin (SFF-8087) Male w/ Latch to SATA 7pin Female (x4) Forward Breakout Cable - Black - Monoprice.com) since they work with the 2 drives that work fine. I have some WD RED 3TB NAS drives coming soon, but I'm going to guess it won't see those either. I've tried them one at a time, change the drive spinup parameters so only 1 drive spools up at a time, increased the time for spooling, ect. Nothing seems to work.

Does anyone have any ideas for me?

edit: All the guides I've read imply flashing firmware on these cards is a huge headache.. but for me it seemed pretty easy. Maybe it was too easy and I overlooked something. Basically all I did was use MegaRaid Storage Manager in Windows to upgrade both the bios, and controller firmware.

 

[mobilenvidia]

LSI 9201, I think has no NVRAM which means it can't do any kind of RAID, and why there is only IT FW for the 9201
ie the 9201 is a plain as you get HBA (best for ZFS)

Try flashing just the IT FW for the 9201, and see if this helps
Its exactly the same version as the 9211 but ofcourse no BIOS
You'll need to clear the FW then just flash the IT firmware, ie loose the BIOS

 

[Diverge]

LSI 9201, I think has no NVRAM which means it can't do any kind of RAID, and why there is only IT FW for the 9201
ie the 9201 is a plain as you get HBA (best for ZFS)

Try flashing just the IT FW for the 9201, and see if this helps
Its exactly the same version as the 9211 but ofcourse no BIOS
You'll need to clear the FW then just flash the IT firmware, ie loose the BIOS

My understanding is that LSI 9201-8i is oem only type of card. Not listed on LSI's site. It's basically a 9211-8i w/o IR mode (no flash). It already has the lastest IR firmware via 9211-8i files. I didn't get it for raid. I'm going to be using it with software raid, so all I wanted was IT mode. Problem is it can't see most of the drives i've tried it with. They spool up then nothing, same as just powering a drive with no sata connection.

Could cables work for some brand/model drives, but not others?

edit: just tried it with an old WD WD 740 (74GB raptor), and it worked fine. This is driving me crazy why it only wants to work with certain drives. Unfortunately I don't have any newer drives not in use to test with until my WD red 3TB's get here.

 

[Diverge]

Progress!

My WD WD6400AACS have a jumper block, so I tried to google what they mean. Turns out WD no longer lists this drive on their site, so no info for this particular drive is there. But I did find info for other drives, but they seem to vary with different models.


I found these 2 pictures for the jumper layouts. but neither is exactly for my drive:
http://support.wdc.com/images/kb/sata.gif

Specifications for Caviar Green and Caviar GP Serial ATA hard drives

Basically there are 4 different jumper settings. No jumper is default, and in that config the majority list it as spread spectrum off. I finally got it to detect when placing the jumper across pins 1 and 2. So either that enabled spread spectrum, or lowered the sata link speed.

 

[NotMine999]

If the drive that is having trouble is an older SATA1 drive, then the jumper disabled the drive's ability to recognize SATA speeds, effectively locking it to SATA1 speeds. The older original WDC Raptor drives (SATA1 only speed) sometimes needed that jumper installed when the drive was attached to certain SATA2 controllers. Been there and done that.