Sas disk not working with SAS PCI cards

[gderyca]

Hello, I just recently installed a DL580. I am using a seagate 600gb Sas drive as my OS with a Maxx Digital 8 bay chassis.

Red hat 6.2 Software. The system came with two Serial Attached SCSI controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2008 PCI-E       xpress Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon] (rev 03). The sytem boots fine as long as the OS disk is the ONLY disk drive in the chassis. As soon as I add another disk the OS starts to have problems. The first sign is the yellow transfer light on the disk going away and just having the blue light. The yellow light comes back after a minute or so and then I can do the lssci and sometimes it will see the added drive. Then the OS disk will not allow me to do certain commands and I get input/output errors. I have tried different drives from other DL580 systems and they do the same thing. I noticed that the other 580 has a higher rev LSI card (2308) and yet that system is 5 months older and works just fine. This problem is on both of our new HP580 systems. I tried different chassis, cables and tried different PCI cards (total 2 per system) and still not working.  I figure maybe this is a driver issue, but am not sure since I am new to HP. Any help would be great. Thanks, Gerry

[Mark Matthews]

I've seen a similar thing when trying to attach a third party disk enclosure to a Proliant server.
It turns out that I had the wrong type of SAS cable to connect the two.

There are two main types of external SAS cable;

x1 and x4

It should be printed on the cable itself.
x1 cables are only for attaching tape drives to a SAS HBA (the x1 being 1 device only I presume)

You need a x4 cable when attaching multiple devices (ie disks)

Something to do with the rule where you can only have 4 SAS disks per cable.

You'll also need a SAS Smart Array controller in the server NOT just a SAS HBA in order to do anything meaningful with the disks.