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These hot-swap expander backplanes still won't see SATA drives. I have fifteen SC5650 chassis with S5500BC and S5520HC boards, Intel SASSRCLS4I RAID cards. They are using 500 GB WDC or 1 TB Seagate SATA drives. Six drives in RAID 6 configuration.
As delivered, they would only see four of the six drives on a reboot.
The Intel TA-0898 addressed the issue. It said to upgrade the HSBP firmware to version 2.09 or later. I put in the 2.12. release and the problem was better, but not solved. The systems would now work fine on a warm boot, but if they were shutddown, they would come up with four recognized drives of the six. A quick reset when the RAID BIOS screen flashed the "missing drives" warning would bring up the machine with all drives present in the RAID.
This month (November 2009) Intel's support site released HSBP version 2.14. In the release notes, "not seeing SATA drives" was listed as a problem fixed in this release. I installed this on 12 systems. It's better: Now when the machines can be shut down and powered up, and the RAIDs show all drives.
But,if the power is removed from the machines altogether, they will come back up with missing drives in the RAID.
So the problem is known, but it looks like the fixes are being released without adequate testing.
Has anyone found a workaround for this? I'm running one power hit away from a disaster!
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I do see quite a few 500Gb WD drives tested for the SRCSASLS4I at
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/srcsasls4i/sb/CS-028827.htm
Which model are you using?
To narrow down whether it has anything to do with the RAID card - do the drives drop out if you plug straight into one of the motherboards, instead?
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The Western Digital drives are RE3 series, model WD5002ABYS. I'm getting identical results with current model 1 TB Seagates, so the drives don't appear to be the issue.
No drives have been connected to the motherboard directly. VMware doesn't support the Intel software RAID, so the RAID card is the only way I can use the system.
I've found nothing about LSI or RAID card and this problem on the net. The issue is only the expander backplane. Intel has published 2 "fixes" for this specific problem, but they are only partial solutions.
I'm wondering if there is some secret configuration setting that I'm missing?
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Nothing secret that I can see. I think I'd probably turn to Intel Customer Support at this point.

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