Active backplane and sas raid controller problem

trinca95

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Sep 12, 2019
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hi, i'm new on the forum and i'm on the first experience on server grade electronics. i've a intel sr2600urlxr with 2x xeon5670 96bg of ddr3 ram 1333mhz.
it has an integrated sas/sata raid controlled SROMBSASMP2 (firmware version 1.40-232-1007) from intel and an active backplane.
when i started the installation of freenas the raid causes alot of problem (although i was installing the os from usb to usb with no disk installed ....why it does that? usb now are under raid?) so i went into the Bios and disable the SAS raid controller. reboot and all go ok for the installation but the backplane started beeping like crazy. single beep infinite time. turns out that if the SAS is disable the backplane beeps...... so i'm here to ask if someone know or how to disable the beeping or how to disable the functionality of the raid controller inside the Intel Raid BIOS Console.
thanks in advance
 

HoneyBadger

actually does care
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iXsystems
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Feb 6, 2014
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Welcome.

While I don't have specific experience with your hardware, I imagine the backplane is throwing an error similar to "I can't see an upstream device, so PANIC".

A quick glance at the system specs shows that there's an onboard SAS controller, and it can be "upgraded" with a HW RAID key, described as part "AXXRAKSAS2" - however the SAS chip is the LSI SAS1078 which is old and limited to SAS1 and 2TB drives. https://usermanual.wiki/Intel/IntelAxxraksas2UsersManual432225.1805832449.pdf

If this is the case and it's using that old chipset and is forced to HW RAID by design, I would suggest getting rid of it and replacing with an LSI SAS2008 or SAS2308 based card; the popular models here are the LSI 9211-8i and 9207-8i, but OEM cards like the IBM M1015, Dell PERC H200, PERC H310, and HP H220 can all be obtained very inexpensively (USD$20-25 for the H200) and reflashed to behave like the more expensive LSI cards.
 
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