I have an IBM M1115 RAID Controller. It has 8 Seagate SATA drives connected to it using what I assume is a forward breakout cable (SFF-8087 to 4x SATA).
When I power it up without flashing to LSI 9211 firmware, sometimes I see 8 drives in the LSI BIOS (Ctrl + H). Other times, I see 7 drives, with one drive missing, and one drive showing as "Unconfigured Bad". Other times, it boots up seeing 5 JBOD drives, missing 3 other drives.
I also hear one or more disks spinning up and down every 30 seconds or so. Only disks in the center of the NAS spin up and down, those connected to the second SAS port on the controller.
Also, when I try to boot into FreeNAS, I get an error "BTX Halted"…
I flashed the card to the LSI 9211-8i IT firmware. Now instead of Ctrl + H, I can press Ctrl + C to enter the BIOS. When I go into SAS Topology, it says that no drives are detected. However, the system now boots into FreeNAS with no issue.
I tried to flash to the LSI 9211-8i IR firmware, and still there are no drives detected.
I flashed back to the IBM firmware, and it now sees most drives, though they randomlly disappear, and spin up and down.
What could be causing this? Would the wrong type of SAS to SATA cable cause this kind of issue? Maybe I have a "reverse" breakout cable instead of "forward"? Would any drives show up at all if it was the wrong cable?
Thank you for your help.
Best Answer
Solution was to replace my powersupply with a quality 750watt one. This stopped the issue of drives spinning down.