C210 M2, RAID Issues, Unable to see any drives

[Clark-Computers_2]

Hi,

We have a C210 M2 server, unfortunately the LSI RAID controller was not included in the order.  We purchased a LSI MegaRAID 9261-8i seperately along with 2x 0.75m SFF-8087 cables to connect the 5x SAS drives we have for the server.

We cannot get the RAID card to recognise any of the drives.  They are loaded into drive bays 1 - 5 and both channels on the LSI card are connected to ports 'Drives 1 - 4' and 'Drives 5 - 8' on the board.  I've ensured the on-board controller is set to ENHANCED within the BIOS and have tried the RAID card in multiple slots.

Is the LSI card or cables different to the Cisco branded card?

Thanks in advance

AS

[Daniel Laden · Accepted solution]

I have had cases similar to what your experiencing resolved by using the Cisco provided cable.

R210-SASCBL-002=                 Long SAS Cable for C210 (connects to SAS Extender)

Thank You,

Dan Laden

[Phil Brutsche]

We have also run into this problem; a TAC engineer (the same Dan Laden that posted before me) determined that the R210-SASXTDR daughterboard was bad. The RAID controller could see the "enclosure" - the daughterboard - but could not see the drives connected to it.

As for the other questions:

My experience is that an SAS cable is an SAS cable. As long as both ends are the SFF-8087 you're good to go.

The Cisco-provided LSI cards are somehow different from the retail LSI cards - they take different firmware. Putting the OEM (LSI) firmware on a Cisco 9261-8i causes "bad things" to happen to the array until I used the hostupdate ISO to put Cisco-provided firmware back on it.