IBM M1115 and LSI 9211-8i IT Drives Somtimes Detected

[crc4430]

Update, version 16 of the firmware made the drives be detected in LSI firmware IT mode. However, drives 0-4 keep appearing and disappearing. I can also hear them spinning up and down. Drives 5-7 are stable. Drives 0-4 are connected to one of the SAS slots on the controller, and 5-7 to the other. Any idea what could be causing this? Defective controller? Bad cable? Bad motherboard? Should I try a different PCI Express slot on the motherboard?

 

[crc4430]

I switched the cables on the controllers around, now drive 0-4 are stable, and drives 5-7 keep restarting. Bad controller, or bad cable?

 

[danb35]

I'm thinking bad cable.

 

[Ericloewe]

I switched the cables on the controllers around, now drive 0-4 are stable, and drives 5-7 keep restarting. Bad controller, or bad cable?

Try the cable first. Get a new one and my hunch is the problem will go away.

 

[crc4430]

I replaced the cables, and I still got the same issue. I decided to upgrade the BIOS on the GA-MA790XT-UD4P to version F9b from the Gigabyte website. After the upgrade, I am able to boot with no issue into FreeNAS, and all the drives show up. However, when I create a new ZFS volume, and connect from ESXi via iSCSI to the FreeNAS server, and start transferring a file for testing, I get an error message saying that ada1 is detached, and the entire volume fails.

ada 0 through 3 are attached to the motherboard SATA ports. I removed all the drives connected to the motherboard, and booted into FreeNAS only using the HBA. Everything worked perfectly. I was able to transfer files with no failure.

I next tried to downgrade the BIOS to version F8. I get to the AHDCI ROM screen, where it keeps saying "scanning for drives" until it times out and says "Something wrong with your hardware!"

I think it's some sort of issue with AHCI. Has anyone seen this before?

 

[cyberjock]

AHCI is often a problem on AMD based systems because the SATA chipsets used are often not compatible with FreeBSD/FreeNAS.

ACPI is often a problem too.

There's a bunch of problems that often come up with AMD, so I can't say I'm too surprised. AMD just isn't a good choice for FreeBSD based systems, which is why we don't recommend them. If/when AMD decides to step up their game then the forum will be updated appropriately.

 

[crc4430]

Just seems odd that everything is detected fine, I am able to create a ZFS volume, but as soon as I try to write to that volume, I get a "ada1 detached" message. I can hear the drive spin down, and spin back up again. I have the drive connected using a SATA power to Molex adapter. Maybe the voltage is incorrect? Maybe the PSU rail powering these drives doesn't have enough wattage? I think this may be a PSU issue, since an AHCI issue would probably not result in a drive spindown...

 

[cyberjock]

AHCI can cause spindown, but not normally. You may want to try a spare PSU just to rule that out...

 

[crc4430]

I replaced the old PSU with a new 1000 watt PSU that has 4 12v rails and enough molex connectors for all the drive backplanes. Drives stopped spinning down and I was able to copy files as large as 10gb via iSCSI.

I am now trying to move my VMware vmdk file with a size of 150gb from my old local datastore to the new FreeNAS datastore via iSCSI. I keep running into this error:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2009097

Is there a way to increase block size in FreeNAS or is this done in VMware? I use VMFS-5 on ESXi 5.5. What do I need to increase it to to copy a 150gb vmdk?