I was looking to upgrade my storage and was recommended to go with used SAS drives and an LSI SAS controller. I purchased an LSI 9211-8i HBA, 8TB Seagate Exos drives, and these cables. The drives are not spinning up at all when connected to the power supply. Are these cables not the right choice for this?

Edit: I have confirmed that a regular SATA drive works if connected with an SFF-8087 to Sata cable. Either I’ve somehow received 10 dead drives or I’m not powering them right.

Edit 2: I’m guessing its related to this: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/84038-so-your-new-sas-or-sata-drive-wont-start-spin-up/

What an irritating issue.

So my options seem to be:

  • Tape mod the SATA power adapter or drives to prevent pin 3 from disabling the drive - cheap but tedious
  • Use a molex adapter to power the drives - less cheap, I’d need new PSU and SAS cables
  • Upgrade my PSU to one that supports SATA 3.3 - I’ll probably do this. I just bought a new PSU for the purpose of powering these drives, so I can still return it.
  • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    That is very interesting. I had some SAS drives I was using in a server but I retired them and was trying to use them on a desktop, and had exactly this, and they are HGST as well. I figured it was the adapter, but wasn’t sure how to fix it. Thanks for the link.

    • priapus@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Nice, hope it helps. I was really surprised by how difficult it was to find out the cause of the issus, but maybe my search skills were just failing me. I’m glad the fix is so simple.

  • litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    I see two potential issues here, one of which I addressed in an older comment elsewhere.

    The first is whether that breakout cable is a forward breakout cable, which is what you need when one controller is being split out to multiple HDDs. If it’s a backwards breakout cable, then there is no possibility that it will work for your configuration. The description on that Amazon page doesn’t explicitly say which way it is, also it does mention using the cable for one controller to four drives. So maybe this is indeed a forward breakout cable.

    The second potential issue is whether the Power Disable (PWDIS) feature is causing the drives to stay powered down. Although looking at that cable you have, I can’t see where 3.3v would be coming from, unless you’re attaching a SATA power connector that actually provides 3.3v, or if the cable itself is producing 3.3v by an internal buck converter from the 12v or 5v rails.

  • Creat@discuss.tchncs.de
    0·
    1 month ago

    Yes you need the power cable fix to stop 3.3v from getting to the drives. Just tape it and it’ll be fine, takes 5 minutes.