Can't find all my disks

[StFS]

Hi.

I have a Dell Precision T5400 tower with 16G of RAM that I'm working on setting up as a FreeNAS server for my home.

I bought 6 WD RED 4Tb drives to go into that. Unfortunately, the motherboard only has 5 SATA ports so I bought a TEC SATA3 PCIe controller card (Marvell 9128 chipset).

I can get all 6 WD RED drives to appear but I have a WD GREEN drive lying around and I wanted to use that as a separate pool of its own as well (don't worry, it won't be part of the RED zfs pool) but when I plug that drive into the TEC SATA controller it doesn't appear. I did some experiments and swapped the plugs on the TEC controller that I was using for the GREEN and the RED disks and if I plug the RED disk into one port, it appears with ID 0 (the GREEN has ID 8) in the boot screen and I get 6 RED disks in FreeNAS. However, if I swap this and plug the GREEN disk into that port, I see that the GREEN has ID 0 in the boot screen while the RED gets ID 8 and I get 5 RED and 1 GREEN inside FreeNAS.

If I only have one disk connected to the TEC controller it doesn't matter which plug I use, it always appears inside FreeNAS.

So the problem seems to be that I can't get both ports on the TEC controller working simultaneously. I just wanted to check if anybody has knowledge about this "problem"? Or is it maybe by design for this controller? I tried going into the admin view for it at boot time but I couldn't find any settings that made any difference. I did notice that I could select between RAID 0 and RAID 1 so my guess is that if this controller has 2 disks connected, it will always do some sort of a RAID on them and then present them as a single disk. Might that be the case?

I'm a bit annoyed because I bought this thing believing it had 2 SATA ports. It would be good to get some info on this if that is not the case if I go back to the store and complain ;-)

 

[StFS]

My next question would be what you guys would recommend I do to get that WD GREEN disk up and running in my FreeNAS:

1) throw away the TEC card and buy this one (https://www.amazon.com/SAS9211-8I-8...0&sr=1-1&keywords=LSI+SAS+9211-8i&tag=ozlp-20)

2) buy another TEC card and use "port 0" on both of them.

Option two is a little cheaper but option one is obviously a better card as it's recommended here on the forum. However, am I fairly safe in assuming that that card will handle both disks simultaneously?

 

[kdragon75]

1) throw away the TEC card and buy this one (https://www.amazon.com/SAS9211-8I-8...0&sr=1-1&keywords=LSI+SAS+9211-8i&tag=ozlp-20)

And with two breakout cables, you can run all of your drives from that. Except you can get the Dell perc h310 and crossflash it for $25 USD on ebay. I don't know about shipping customs etc..

 

[StFS]

And with two breakout cables, you can run all of your drives from that. Except you can get the Dell perc h310 and crossflash it for $25 USD on ebay. I don't know about shipping customs etc..

Is that equivalent of using separate ports for each drive? I thought I read somewhere that breakout cables would share the port bandwidth between the drives?

 

[kdragon75]

breakout cables would share the port bandwidth between the drives?

This is not the case. Each SSF-8087 port has 4 lanes. The breakout gives you 4 sas ports. That's one lane per drive. If you used a SAS expander, the lanes get shared but even then, your talking about 24gbps or 3GBps of throughput per SSF-8087. You would need 12 drives pushing 250MBps to saturate that. It's really only an issue when working with SSDs.

 

[StFS]

Well this is great to know. But then here comes an even dumber question or two.

1) Can I use that card I linked to above for the WD Red disks I have in the way you describe. I ask because you talk about SAS and the controller is SAS/SATA but my WD RED disks are SATA (only I believe).

2) Could I use a breakout cable on the Sata ports that are already on the motherboard?

 

[kdragon75]

1) Can I use that card I linked to above for the WD Red disks I have in the way you describe. I ask because you talk about SAS and the controller is SAS/SATA but my WD RED disks are SATA (only I believe).

The LSI card you linked and the H310 are in fact the same card. The Dell version just needs to get flashed back to LSI IT firmware and is much less expensive.

2) Could I use a breakout cable on the Sata ports that are already on the motherboard?

No. The SSF-8087 is basically just 4 ports combined together. the ports on your motherboard are just standard individual ports.
I just looked up that tower. It based on the Xeon 5400 series CPU, do you heat you house with it?;)