Identifying Drives in the LFF 2 Bay on a DL370g6

[Scott2112]

Recently received a production server which is in use.  It's a Proliant DL370 G6 with 2 SSF 6 bay cages fully populated and a third LFF 2 bay cage fully populated.  All drives are 600GB SAS 15K for a total of 14 drives.  The server is running Win2008r2 Ent.  It appears that who ever configured it with all indications used the (2) SSF 6 bay cages to have a C:\ Vol Mirrored Disk0 and the balance of the drives as Raid5 Disk1 E:\. Looking at windows explorer and disk management which exactly shows what I just describe.  Here my question:  There still remain the LFF 2 bay cage which has 2 "running" hard drives in it and the "drive light are not on or blinking" and these drives do not show up under disk management nor windows explorer.  Though there in the LFF 2 bay cage running away and I'm not sure what and why they are there and there purpose.  I did pull a drive and the system reacted like I pulled one of the raid 5 hot swap drives.  So I immediately reinserted without any bad effects.  Can anyone shed some light as to their possible purpose?  The folks who had it previously are unable to contact the consultant who set it up for them, so you might say I'm in the dark on further information about this type of config.  I'm not a seasoned HP Comqac Server guy, Dell's are my forte.  I would have put a picture of the server but i wasn't cleared to make an attachment.

Let me know

Thanks...Scott2112    

[TTr]

The only tool that will give you the detailed information about how the disks are connected and configured is ACU/SSA. Check if it is installed, if not it's available here as HPE SSA under Software system management.
http://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/readIndex?sp4ts.oid=5177954&swLangOid=8&swEnvOid=4064

>...I did pull a drive and the system reacted like I pulled one of the raid 5 hot swap drives
What exactly happened? 

[Torsten.]

the ml and dl370 g6 is a bit complicated.
there are special rules for sas cables, jumpers at the disk backplanes and numbers at the disk backplane power cables. if one of them is wrong, you get a wrong numbering. i need to check my old notes for details ...

[Torsten.]

This is how it looks like - the disk boxes are numbered:

Now you can connect the disks either to the P410i directly, via P410i and a SAS expander board or vi multiple smart array controllers.

The disk backplanes have a power connector, the connector cable must match the box number (number on the power plug).

There is a jumper on each disk backplane, you need to configure the box number.

 

The next picture is showing how you connect box 1 and 3 to the P410i directly.

Note:

(4) is a special Y-cable!

(5) connects the LEDs - this is the LED cable!

If you now have a SAS expander, you connect 2 cables to box 1, 2 cables to box 2 and 1 cable to box 3.

IMPORTANT:

You need to REMOVE the LED cable between box 1 and box 3!!!

Some background:

The 6 slot box has from logical view 2 backplanes, one for lower 4 slots and one for upper 2 slots.

So in the configuration shown above box 3 is a logical extension of the upper disk backplane of box 1.

[Torsten.]

Just to add:

if the cabling is incorrect, all tools (SSA/ACU/ILO) are showing totally wrong box:slot information about the installed disks.

In the last years I found several DL370 G6 and ML370 G6 with this combination, with SAS expander installed AND the LED cable installed - this created the confusion.

Once the LED cable was removed, all was working as expected.

The removal of that cable does NOT affect any data.