Can‘t get the Lenovo 430-16i to be detected by TrueNAS

TrueNAS General
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That’s what StorCLI shows via EFI Shell. Heartbeat LED of the Lenovo 430-16i is blinking green.

The vendor who has sold me the card says he can’t really help from remote ( not really happy about that )

He basically says if the LED is blinking green the Controller should be there.

I already tested the card in all three PCI E Slots I have in my Supermicro X10DRU-i+ Board.

I checked BIOS Option many many times … still I can‘t get it to work.

Quiet Boot in BIOS is disabled.

CSM is disabled.

Above 4G Decoding is disabled.

The Riser Cards I have changed from Legacy to EFI.

Boot I have changed from Dual to UEFI.

Latest BIOS is installed on the Motherboard.

I don’t even see the Card as an Entry in the BIOS.

so in Summary it seems it doesn’t get recognized and neither does it work yet.

A 9300-16i HBA card works without problems. But it draws too much power and gets to warm and than start to show I/O Errors. Hence why I bought the Lenovo card.

I have a MacBook M4 Pro and a Mac Mini M4 machine.
Via one of my brothers I would have access to a Windows machine.

Anyone has an idea?

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No idea on recognising the card - but it seems like an exercise in fultility expecting the card to run much cooler. It is based on a LSI 9400 - I am not aware that those run a lot cooler.

I imagine that you need to actively cool any HBA you put in a machine as they are all designed to run in DC style servers with plenty of airflow.

The 9300-16i is a bit of a power hog (and thus runs hot) due to its dual nature (its two -8i’s on board, rather than a single -16i) but all LSI HBA’s are heat producers and will need supplemental cooling in a typical home server

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I will put it in the evening into the Windows Machine of my Brother and see what happens. If it works over there I might have to flash the card. According to the seller it’s in IT Mode and has Lenovo Firmware for SAS and SATA

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That’ the rub, really. There are few reliable alternatives to LSI HBA’s and unlike Intel with the x710 series, they haven’t released a modern chip-version of the older 92xxx or 93xx series. Instead, we get tri-mode cards, that may work very well but which reportedly are not as reliable as the 92xx and 93xx series.

Does anyone know of a lower-power alternative to LSI that plays nice with SCALE?

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So will a Broadcom 9305-16i better and more reliable for me?

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So we tried it in brothers Win11 Machine with a MSI x570 Gaming Plus motherboard.

Heartbeat LED is blinking constantly green.

EFi Shell Shows Number of Controllers 0

CSM activated and disabled we tried = 0

Secure Boot disabled

Windows Device Manager doesn’t show any unrecognized devices.

Any idea?

The only one I have left is try in an other windows machine if it’s the same HBA card defect?

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And these Tri-Mode cards have, or had, three drawbacks:

  1. Silly Tri-Mode for U.3 drives and backplanes.
  2. High price compared with 9200/9300.
  3. From 9500 onwards, a whole new driver stack.

1/ remains as relevant as ever: Don’t use U.3 backplanes for NVMe. But SAS is fine: 9400 and later ARE the modern versions of 9300.
2/ is no longer relevant, as these cards are now hitting the refurbished market as well.
And, at some point, 3/ should become obsolete as well because the drivers will have enough flight time to be regarded “safe”.

If the card is not detected in several PCIe slots of two different computers, I would assume that the card is dead—or a very bad fake. Send it back.

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