R710 Perc H200 Help. No drives detected - Truenas scale

TrueNAS General
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Posting here because this seems like a common build for truenas.
I got a R710 with a perc 6. I purchased an H200 and flashed it to IT mode, first using this post PERC H200I IT mode on a Dell R710 | Diary of a maker then following this post Reddit - Dive into anything

After both attempts at flashing I am unable to see the 2 WD red 3TB drives connected to the back plane. Neither in the h200 bios (ctrl-c) topology map or in truenas scale. Both flashing attempts were successful. when the H200 loads at startup I get the message lsi corporation mpt boot rom, no supported devices found.

s2fp19.exe -c 0 -list

showed correct board name and firmware. h200 IT mode (0x2213 (IT)) and 20…etc. I am using sff-8087 to sff-8087 right angle cables to go from the h200 to the r710 backplane. I have tested the Hdd’s in a windows system and they work.

please let me know any other information I can provide. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

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Did the drives detect in the system prior to being flashed?

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Thanks for the help firesyde424 but I fixed the problem. I did not have the drives in with the h200 installed before flashing so I’m not sure if they showed.
The actual problem was something really stupid on my part. I’m using WD red 3tb and WD plus 4tb drives, all of these are SATA drives. So when I installed them into the HDD sleds I used the holes marked SATA. I’m new to using HDD sleds, hot swap cases, backplanes so it wasn’t obvious that the back of the drives were not properly aligned with the back of the HDD sleds. I reinstalled the drives on the sleds using the holes marked SAS and immediately everything showed up.
When the system was booting up I almost didn’t want the drives to show because I didn’t want the problem to be something so stupid.
Anyways. Thanks for the help.

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The root cause of this, if you’re wondering, is because the sleds in those Dell systems typically are designed to hold a SATA to SAS interposer card, which look a little something like this:

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image1200×901 52 KB

While SATA drives will fit into a SAS port, and typically work fine, older systems and storage controllers didn’t particularly like mixing SAS and SATA on the same backplane/controller/logical volume, so interposers basically presented a SATA device as SAS - while also adding options for dual-paths, different protocols, etc.

But, that interposer board takes up a bit of room in the sled, such that the SATA drives need to be slid forward.

Thanks for coming back and sharing the fix - while it might seem silly in the moment, I can guarantee you’ve helped someone else out in the future! :slight_smile:

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