Perc H310 - no disks found

weird_dave · 6 Dec 2018 at 21:57

So I bought a H310 card and 2 4-way sata adaptor cables.
Plugged the card in and attached 2 drives, neither are seen by the card. Drives are seen fine by the motherboard when connected to the sata ports on it.
I can boot Win7 (the boot drive connected to the motherboard) and see that windows recognises the card.
I have no idea where to go from here. I won't require booting via the card but I will need to be able to access the drives connected to it.

weird_dave · 6 Dec 2018 at 23:30

Could it be the cables, their description is: (the last line made me think these would work)

Discrete to SFF-8087 (Reverse breakout) cable
Cable Type: Reverse breakout cable
RoHS Compliant
Connector on Case Backplane End: 1 x 36-pin - SFF-8087.
Connector on Raid Controller or Motherboard End: 4 x 7-pin - SATA
Use for server case or enclosure with MiniSAS SFF-8087 Backplane, such as RPC-4220 storage case (RPC-3216, RPC-2208, RPC-1204)
100% Brand new and high quality.
Mini SAS SFF-8087 36 pin male connector for backplane.
4 SATA 7 pin female connectors for drives.

a bit more googling suggests I screwed up, can someone point me towards cables that will actually work?

bremen1874 · 6 Dec 2018 at 23:51

As long as you avoid reverse breakout cables you should be okay.

The item's description you tell you which end is which. The majority of the cables will be the correct way around for what you need.

OcUK does sell one them (link) so linking out would be against the rules.

weird_dave · 7 Dec 2018 at 00:24

Avoiding them doesn't seem easy, at least not if I don't want to spend £30, add that to the cost of the card and I could have just bought an 8 port sata card...
On the bright side, all the hot-swap kit I bought to go with it seems to be working fine

bremen1874 · 7 Dec 2018 at 00:32

It's a really common cable. Googling 'mini sas to sata forward breakout cable' finds them for under £10.

Avalon · 7 Dec 2018 at 06:58

Mini SAS to 4 x SATA breakout cables are from £2.28 delivered, better quality versions start from £3 odd on the bay of thieves, you need SAS to SATA, not SATA to SAS.

weird_dave · 7 Dec 2018 at 09:29

I believe I have found some, ordered a uk one to get me going in the hope it arrives faster than 2 from china I've also ordered, but given some recent transactions I've made, it's quicker from china!
So, if anyone wants some free reverse cables.....

Interestingly, the only one I could find at £2.28 is a reverse. Almost all of them say somewhere in the description 'reverse', despite the title saying SAS to Sata, I've gone for ones that explicitly state that the sas connector plugs into a controller and the sata plugs into drives, so fingers crossed.

Thanks for the help guys

.

Toughnoodle · 7 Dec 2018 at 10:46

Is the H310 a Dell RAID card? Do you need to create virtual disks?

weird_dave · 7 Dec 2018 at 11:02

The card doesn't see any disks to create anything with, but I'm pretty convinced it's the cables

weird_dave · 3 Jan 2019 at 20:17

Well, my cables finally turned up, no drives recognised with either the UK sourced or Chinese 'forward' cables, what am I missing?

Kei · 3 Jan 2019 at 20:42

cbl-sff8087ocf-06m is what I bought for my server and work just fine with my lsi 8888ELP and intel expander. They are molex branded with the code 79576-3004 on the cable itself at the sas connector end.

I started out with a reverse breakout cable and experienced the no disks found issue. (cable I had to begin with was also molex branded with the code 79576-3007)

bremen1874 · 3 Jan 2019 at 20:47

Is the card still configured for RAID?

Have you gone into the RAID configuration on boot?

weird_dave · 3 Jan 2019 at 20:54

I've hit Ctrl-R and got into the cards BIOS, from there there's nothing I can do, no drives listed, no options to play with, only reset the config.

bremen1874 · 3 Jan 2019 at 21:01

Strange.

If you get really stuck I'd be willing to test the card for you. Hopefully, someone will have a solution to offer before you need to resort to that.

weird_dave · 3 Jan 2019 at 21:22

I appreciate the offer.
The only other thing of note is that there's a flashing LED on the card, but I can't find any documentation that mentions it.
The cards BIOS screen looks like this, minus the line "Unconfigured Physical Disks" and on the right, 0 physical disks.

weird_dave · 3 Jan 2019 at 21:30

Newsflash:
So, yesterday I was given a new 2.5" drive, I've just plugged into that and I now have 1 drive listed!
So either I have incompatible drives, or I just got lucky on that port and some of the others might be broken (due to previously wrong cables, the TX lines would have been fighting, I don't know if they are protected).
So I've now booted into windows and the drive is visible.
Please stay tuned, there will be another problem based on the results of some port testing!

weird_dave · 3 Jan 2019 at 23:02

Right, so I accidentally connected my boot drive, which I was planning to keep connected directly to the mobo to make life easy, well, it only went and booted into windows without any problems!
Much testing later and I think the card is working fine, the 2 Chinese cables aren't!
So I'll be ordering yet another cable....
The cards BIOS config is currently at "no configuration present", but it seems to be working so I don't think I'll be making any changes unless someone has a better idea?

Avalon · 4 Jan 2019 at 00:30

weird_dave said:
I appreciate the offer.
The only other thing of note is that there's a flashing LED on the card, but I can't find any documentation that mentions it.
The cards BIOS screen looks like this, minus the line "Unconfigured Physical Disks" and on the right, 0 physical disks.

That says H800?

weird_dave · 4 Jan 2019 at 11:02

Lol, yes, it does, it was the closest image I could find to what I was seeing, needs adding to the spot the differences list

bremen1874 · 4 Jan 2019 at 13:29

Seeing the drives without a config on the card is odd.

It's possible that the card has been flashed into IT mode with the BIOS left in place.