DL380 Gen10 12LFF only sees 10 disks

[pieterv]

I'm a novice in configuring servers, so bear with me for "stupid" questions...

We bought a Proliant DL380 Gen10 with 12LFF on the front. We are using the standard S100i controller. I installed a single SATA SSD on the M.2 slot (works fine). Now I'm trying to populate the 12 LFF slots on the front with SATA drives. Up to 10 disks work well, but I'm struggling with the last 2, in particular the 2 on the bottom right. They don't appear in the BIOS list of drives. When I insert a disk in one of those 2 slots, I see some initial LEDs flashing, but afterwards nothing. Any hints on the direction in which I should search?

Pieter

[krisd443]

I saw this when using a 3rd party adapter for putting 2.5" SSDs into LFF smart trays. They didn't always seat perfectly, but sat well enough to light up, while still not available to the BIOS.

In my case, they showed up in iLO as there being degraded storage and the disk itself had a separate error, I think about not being able to authenticate the disk. I added another screw to make the tray a bit more rigid, reseated it, and it seemed to come up okay so I could built it into a smartcache array.

[BPSingh]

Greetings!

By "2 drives on the bottom right", I understand that you are referring to slot 11 and 12

Page#74 https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=a00008180enw

I understand that you are using only SATA drives as S100i supports SATA drives only.

Please confirm by installing working drives on those slots.

Remove and reseat the cabling from the controller to the drive backplane.

Is the m.2 drive installed is an HPE drive? Please have the m.2 drive removed to check if there is any change in the behaviour.

[pieterv]

Thank you for your reply!  Here are my findings so far:

1. yes, I'm using only HPE SATA drives. By swapping drives, I verified that they are all working
2. Reseating the cabling didn't change anything. In addition, I swapped the cables of the lowest 2 drive boxes and this showed that the problem must be on the controller site as the problem moved to the other drive box
3. The M.2 SSD was a Samsung card I happen to have laying around, not an HP one. Removing it didn't solve the problem

Unfortunately, I will not be at the office for a while, so I will have to let it rest for the moment. I will probably contact support when I'm back.

[Victor19]

Hi Pieterv, I hope you're doing well.

I'm currently facing the same issue with my DL380 Gen10 server — it only detects 10 out of 12 drives. Originally, the server came with a single 8-bay SFF backplane, and we recently added a second 4-bay SFF box using the HPE 826691-B21 kit to expand our storage.

However, even though all drives are physically connected, only 10 are recognized by the system. We're using the embedded Smart Array S100i controller, and after reviewing both HPE QuickSpecs and user forums, it appears that the S100i may be limited to 10 usable SATA ports on this platform, despite claiming support for up to 14 drives (depending on the server model).

Have you found a solution or workaround for this limitation? Did you have to upgrade to a dedicated Smart Array controller like the E208i-a or P408i-a to fully utilize all 12 drives?

Thanks in advance for your help,
Best regards,
Victor