I have received my recent 6TB group buy kit (plus free extra 300GB SAS 2.5 drive) with additional HGST 600GB Ultrastar C10K1800 2.5" SAS drive from Bitdeals. When I connected all four drives to 9207-8i (Dell 027NFF) using a single SFF-8087 breakout cable, my Unraid server failed to read capacity of HGST 600GB drive. I was able to reformat it to 512-byte sector but the drive just appeared as not ready in the system. I played around with 3.3v mod and problem was the same.
Interestingly, when I only connect HGST 600GB to the same SAS card using the same cable, Unraid was able to mount and format the drive. I can also get into the SAS BIOS drive configuration and format drive there. Follow-up tests show that these combinations of drives could be recognized in SAS BIOS: 1) HGST 600GB + free 300GB SAS drive; 2) free 300GB drive + 1X 6TB SAS drive; and 3) free 300GB drive + 2X 6TB SAS drive. When the HGST 600GB and 1X 6TB drive were connected at the same time, the SAS BIOS disk utility tool would be stuck at “Reading non-volatile settings” stage and never moved forward. I cannot even cancel the reading and had to hard reset for reboot.
As I have almost no experiences with SAS drives, has anyone experienced issues like this that certain SAS drive combination would not work on the same SFF-8087 port? I am planning to get an additional breakout cable to test four drives on both ports. Meanwhile, do you guys think my SAS card or HGST 600GB SAS drive is the problem here? Thanks in advance for all suggestions!
