Perc H310 - no disks found

[weird_dave]

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]

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?

 

[weird_dave]

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

 

[weird_dave]

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 .

 

[weird_dave]

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

 

[weird_dave]

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

 

[weird_dave]

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.

 

[weird_dave]

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]

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]

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?

 

[weird_dave]

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

 

[weird_dave]

Now that I do actually see drives, let me reboot it and take a look at what it says now....


VD Mgmt Page:
- PERC H310 Adaptor (Bus 0x02, Dev 0x00)
No Configuration Present !
(no 3rd line!)

Controller:
Disk Groups: 0
Virtual Disks: 0
Physical Disks: 4

Pressing F2-Operations give me 2 options:
Clear Config
Convert to RAID capable


PD Mgmt page:
4 drives listed as non-RAID (which is correct as I only have 1 working cable)


Ctrl Mgmt page:
[X] Enable controller BIOS (unchecking makes no difference)
[ ] Enable BIOS Stop on Error
[ ] Enable Auto Import

Select boot device: NONE (but it does boot from the attached SSD!)


Properties page:
Product Name : PERC H310 Adaptor
Package : 20.12.2-0001
FW Version : 2.120.12-2762
BIOS Version : 4.34.00_4.12.05.00_0x05260000
Boot Block Version : 2.02.00.00-0001
+PCI info...