RAID controller/Cable possible problem HP N54L (G7)

[T4LLGUY]

Hi everyone, forgive me if I've missed something silly but I'm unable to access the 4 cold swap bays on my unmodified N54L HP MicroServer.

I googled for supported HDDs and found a page on Fandom listing tested drives and their model numbers.

I ordered 5*3TB Hitachi drives (HDS5C3030ALA630) and hooked the 5th drive up in place of the optical drive connected to the vacant onboard motherboard SATA socket.

My boot drive is a 40GB SSD situated below the 5th HDD and running from a SATA to USB converter and plugged into the USB header on the motherboard.

TrueNAS Core installed from USB onto SSD, SSD boots but TrueNAS Control panel only sees the SSD and the 5th HDD.

The 4 HDDs in the cold swap bays are powering on and spinning up, I powered off and removed them and could feel warmth.

I've unplugged and replugged the mini SAS lead but cannot seem to detect those 4 drives?

Am I missing something here? Do I have a possibly faulty SAS lead? Is my motherboard defective? What steps can I take to further diagnose this issue?

All helpful thoughts and suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thank-you in advance!

 

[elvisimprsntr]

Welcome!

1. The N54L has a HW RAID controller. Make sure the onboard SATA controller is set to AHCI mode, i.e. not RAID 0/1. Still may require you to install a separate HBA controller.

SATA Hardware RAID modes: 0, 1

ZFS - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

What's all the noise about HBA's, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

This is relevant to FreeNAS and TrueNAS CORE. Some parts of it might also be relevant to Scale, but I don't really know how reliable the Linux drivers are. 1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with...

www.truenas.com

2. The HDS5C3030ALA630 appear to be desktop class drives, not really suitable for a NAS application. I could not find any information if they are CMR or SMR drives. You will need to determine the drive type to be sure. SMR drive a not compatible in a ZFS application.

List of known SMR drives

Hard drives that write data in overlapping, "shingled" tracks, have greater areal density than ones that do not. For cost and capacity reasons, manufacturers are increasingly moving to SMR, Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR is a form of PMR...

www.truenas.com

3. There are some old posts indicating the N54L is limited to 2TB disks. Not sure if there is a newer BIOS update that addresses that.

HP N54L

Anyone have any experience running FreeNas v9 with the HP N54L Microserver? Interested in running ZFS, de duplication on a small subset of files, and possibly compression. Might also install some plugins, such as Plex & transmission. Im repurposing this from a previous Hyper-V build that was...

www.truenas.com

4. A defect might also be a possibility.

Overall, might not have been good choices.

 

[T4LLGUY]

Thankyou for your reply Elvis, yes.. I tried BIOS setting initially as AHCI, but got nothing.. then moved it to BIOS, and still got nothing.. then finally to RAID, but in the RAID configuration I see no volumes listed. Which got me thinking it was the data connection itself, especially as the drives obviously were getting power.

Yes, I understand the differences between SMR and CMR drives, however I didn't double check myself because this model number was confirmed working on their wiki page. Maybe I should of double checked and will further look into this.

2TB drives were the maximum available at the time of product release (N54L) but the official documentation was never updated. Other people have happily ran up to 6TB drives. Unofficial BIOS modification is primarily for allowing AHCI on eSATA + ODD connection and getting access to a few more BIOS options such as 3.0 GBps - this BIOS mod shouldn't be required for the N54L to 'see' 3TB drives.

Primarily im thinking defect is occuring but today I will try smaller drives in the cold swap bays and see if they get recognised, that will at least confirm if the data cable is working or not?

Should it be the data cable, how easy is a backplane swap? Any ideas N54L/N40L owners??

 

[Arwen]

There are this new SATA / SAS power thing, where they re-used a 3.3v pin for drive reset. If your drives support it, but the power connectors of the server don't and use it for the 3.3v pre-charge, then you have a minor problem.

Check your power connectors and see if they have a populated pin here;

SATA - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Some people use tape on the drive side to disable this "feature", when their server side does not support it.

 

[T4LLGUY]

I am delighted to inform everybody that my suspicions were indeed correct. This morning I went at the MicroServer (with the intention of seeing how easy it was to strip it down and remove the backplane and connected mini SAS connector lead (because I was watching two listings on eBay for circa £13+P&P)

However with the motherboard out and in my hand I could visibly see the mini SAS connector attempting to align with the socket. I could see it was misaligned and using a small flat headed screwdriver I pushed the central assembly within the motherboards mini SAS connector and aligned it 'more centrally' than it was originally positioned.

Upon rebuilding the MicroServer I was delighted to see the four internal drives posting in BIOS. So the whole problem was the internals of the mini SAS socket being misaligned.

Problem solved, thanks for your assistance guys!