My friend recently got an old Storinator from UTexas. This storinator has 3 storage cards, with 3 backplanes for each card. (I think) Regardless, the system posts, and after connecting a set of SSDs to the motherboard for the OS, he’s installed Debian. (The system was moved into a custom case, so the original SN is no where to be found.)
He then installed 4 SATA drives (8TB) into 2 different backplanes, so 2 cards each have 2 drives on them. The Debian system does not see the hard drives after startup though. The drives do not show up. The sata_sil24 driver has been loaded, but nothing else is bound to it. So, first question…is that expected? The drives do not show up?
He asked for my help, and I tried to get into the card’s BIOS to configure them to show the drives, at least in some way. The cards indicate there are no drives connected. WTF!!! Second question…why do the cards not find the drives?
Ultimately, just want the HDs to show up to the OS. Are some special drivers needed? But why can’t the BIOS of the storage cards even show the drives on the port extender cards? I’m tempted to tell him to just get rid of them, but I thought you all would know something.
What make/model are the HBA/expander cards? There’s no support for the old HighPoint cards on modern Linux if that is what they are and you need to go back to a Linux version circa 2016 or something (and load an additional driver that may no longer be a public downlioad). I’m not sure about the BIOS on the cards not at least enumerating the drives connected on POST, it seems that should at least happen. The cards should be compatible with 8 TB SATA 3 drives. You’re using the original motherboard?
I’ve run Windows 10 on a system with the old cards and I could be mis-remembering, but I think it was without without loading special drivers. So, even if Windows isn’t wanted for final state, if I was troubleshooting this, I might load Windows 10 on the system on a spare boot SSD and see if I can see the drives in Disk Administrator. If not, I’d tend to suspect something is wrong with the cards or got messed up in cabling in moving the system to the new case. If the drives do show up, then you know that the hardware is basically ok and can decide how to proceed re running an older Debian or changing out the old cards for something more modern with current Linux support.
Could you please share some picues of the system aswell as what HBA cards you have in it?
As @DigitalGarden said newer OS’s will not work with older Hiphpoint R750HBA cards which is what we used to use in our systems before moving to the LSI 9305 HBA card.
If this is an R750 HBA system then unfortunately there is no good upgrade path for this system as it would require rewiring all the slots and simply changing the HBA card to a newer one is not an option because of the connectors