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SuperMicro 16-Bay chassis only recognizes 12 drives

cn flag

I recently purchased two refurbished Supermicro SC836TQ (3U, 16bay) chassis with SAS backplanes (Standard SAS836-TQ planes).

One works perfectly fine, but the other fails to recognize/initialize any disks installed in the right-most column.

Unfortunately, I'm a little out of my depth in this, so I'm looking for common causes and/or ways to troubleshoot or fix.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Eleasar avatar
ng flag
Do both hosts have the same CPUs installed?
cn flag
Both have a single CPU installed. The one with the fully-functioning backplane has an Intel Xeon E5506 installed while the one with the partially-functioning backplace sports an Intel Xeon E5620.
Eleasar avatar
ng flag
Interesting, I thought a lack of PCIe lanes may be the problem, but the E5620 (5520 Chipset) feature more PCIe lanes than the E5506 (5500 Chipset). I am assuming the SC836TQ uses a PCIe RAID Controller. If so, have you checked all the cables between the backplane and the controller?
cn flag
Correct, they're both Areca ARC-1280ML's. I just swapped all fourth row SATA cables (including the sideband connector) with the third row cables. Third row continued to work, while fourth row was still unresponsive. I wasn't able to switch the molex power cables, since they were snapped on real tight.
cn flag
Tested the molex connectors using a bit of copper and a volt meter. Red correctly measured 5 volts, while yellow was correctly measuring 12 volts. So we can rule out a cable issue.
Eleasar avatar
ng flag
Hmm, it could just be a broken backplane. You could try switching the two backplanes if they're identical, but that would probably be quite a bit of work. Have you checked the BIOS for any obvious settings (or even reset it)? Maybe the link-speed of the RAID Controller is setup wrong, but that seems a bit far fetched?
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