Dell MD1200 (6gb/s jbod enclosure) and 12 Gb/s drives

dell-powervaultlsiraidstorage

For reasons too embarrassing and frustrating to blather about, I am the proud owner of a Dell MD1200 enclosure and 12 ST4000NM0014 4TB Seagate drives (short story: I thought they were ST4000NM0023's).

The drives show as 475Gb units with both the Dell PERC 810 and LSI 9280-8e RAID controllers that I've tried. Can I use my 12Gbps drives on my 6Gbps MD1200 or is this simply not going to work?

Under the PERC 810, the drives show up as 475G on the BIOS screen, so I'm sure it's not an O/S problem (happens to be CentOS 7.2, but again that's not in play here).

Right now, I'd kind of like to try to get the 9280-8e to work (as opposed to a PERC controller) because its the more generic… the Dell, I'm guessing, is fussier…

Here's what my RAID controller looks like. At this point I don't know if a firmware upgrade will help me…

Product Name    : LSI MegaRAID SAS 9280-8e
Serial No       : SV12705912
FW Package Build: 12.13.0-0154

                    Mfg. Data
                ================
Mfg. Date       : 06/30/11
Rework Date     : 00/00/00
Revision No     : 56A
Battery FRU     : N/A

                Image Versions in Flash:
                ================
FW Version         : 2.130.383-2315
BIOS Version       : 3.27.00_4.12.05.00_0x05270000
Preboot CLI Version: 04.04-020:#%00009
WebBIOS Version    : 6.0-51-e_47-Rel
NVDATA Version     : 2.09.03-0045
Boot Block Version : 2.02.00.00-0000
BOOT Version       : 09.250.01.219

Update: BIOS is the latest, 2.5.4. MD1200 Firmware is the latest 1.06. Again, my 9280-8e has a firmware version that's higher than the one currently offered by Broadcom, it appears. I don't know why.

No change in the behavior. I have not gone into the O/S because this problem appears with the PERC and the LSI RAID BIOS software, pre-boot… it's not an OS driver issue.

Best Answer

Drives with a 4K native sector size aren't supported by the MD1200.

http://downloads.dell.com/manuals/common/md1200_md1220_supportmatrix_en-us.pdf

  • Drives with 12 Gbps interface speed will down-train to 6 Gbps when installed in the enclosure. The following are not supported on MD1200/MD1220 enclosures:
    • 4Kn sector size

The ST4000NM0023 drives (Dell P/N 529FG) should work as expected, so if you can return or repurpose the ST4000NM0014 drives that would be a good place to start.

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