Dell R710 and H310 with IT firmware

[irondude]

I have acquired a dell r710, replaced the perc6i with a cross flashed h310 to it firmware. I have searched the forums for similar configurations and have found others have had similar issues but with no resolution. If I leave the dell 6gpbsas firmware on the card, all 6 wd re3 drives installed in the backplane show in the bios. If I flash the card to 9211-8i firmware P7 all is well. I can flash the card up to P16 and works ok. With P17 or later the drives will not show in the bios or other software. During trial and error, I flashed p7->p10->p15->p16 all worked. If i add drives to a breakout cable with P17 or later all drives are seen, but not when connected to the backplane. Downgraded the card to P16 and all is well again. Has anyone else had these peculiar issues with a R710?

EDIT: a little more info / update
My drives are WD RE3 - WD1002FBYS-05A6B0. None are detected. I replaced one in the backplane with a WD Black WD1003FZEX that I had lying around. It it detected as a 1TB 6gbp drive as it should. The RE3 drives detect in another machine(on board sata) as 1TB, link speed only at 1.5gb although the drives and motherboard are capable of at least 3gb.

Thanks

 

[smanocchio]

Hate to dig up such and old thread, but I am in almost the exact situation with slightly different hardware and found this by searching. Have you made any progress?

It seems like the drives may be incompatible. I am also using an R710 but with a M1015. I have 4 WD1002FBYS-05A6B0's and 2 WD1002FBYS-02A6B0's. The later two are detected by the m1015 and in FreeNAS without issue. The other 4 (same as yours), do not show up at all.

I connected the drives to my workstation and checked using Western Digital Data LifeGuard and they have different firmware. The WD1002FBYS-05A6B0 has revision 00.0NA01 and the WD1002FBYS-02A6B0 has revision 03.00C06. All of the drives work with the dell Perc card and in my workstation. I recall them showing up on the M1015 BIOS before flashing to IT mode as well.

I'm at a loss if you or anyone else here doesn't have any recommendations. I haven't found a way to flash the firmware, if it is even possible. It may just be time for some new drives?

 

[irondude]

smanocchio,
I did not get them to work, but this is what i figured out. After not getting my H310 to work, I purchased a LSI 9211-8i from fleabay, it didn't work either. I then started my powers of deduction(ie: time and headaches). The gist - these drives are not detected with firmware 17 and above, 16 and below are ok. The H310 with Dell 6gbps firmware detects all drives. Either card with its corresponding latest IR firmware detects all drives. I have flashed these cards somewhere between 310 to 1015 times;). The specs for my drives that I found stated these are sata2 3gbps drives, but they only link at 1.5gbps. During my research I came across someone stating LSI dropped support for 1.5gbps on this card although I could not find that info at LSI/Broadcom. I did try to read the revision information between versions, but did not find anything about this. I did not try other 1.5gbps drives, as I decided to purchase some larger drives.

Hope this helps shed a little light on the problem.

 

[smanocchio]

Thanks for the response. I may try to continue researching if these drives can be flashed/updated but am prepared to buy new drives if needed.