For those following my journey in Chia, it’s actually been a blast down the road of building out beefier machines than I’m used to at home.
The struggle this morning was getting my eBay-bought LSI 9201-16e HBA card working on Ubuntu 20.04 - I have a 12-disk enclosure sitting next to the machine with these 3x newfangled SFF-8088 mini-SAS cables running between the host plotter and the JBOD.
Anyway ALL of this was new to me so I spent hours figuring it out then a few more hours writing it all up - I hope it helps someone on a similar journey!
Honestly I will have 100% satisfaction if some day, some guy or gal that has never mined chia or dealt with an HBA card before reads that and goes “OHHHHHHhhhhhh ok I get it now.”
Basically what I desperately wanted to find in a forum post myself but had to put in the leg work instead.
Amazingly useful! I have basically a similar setup and less experience and spent literally days trying to troubleshoot this. You have both given me hope and saved me several hours of research. Thank you!
I’ve got to the last step as you but I’m not seeing the drives (I’m seeing the card with the latest firmware - both in Ubuntu and W10). I noticed you are using SATA drives - I’ve got some SAS drives.
My thinking was that the card did the “translation” to SAS - but is that wrong? Maybe I need a different mobo.
My SAS drives aren’t spinning up (or don’t appear to be)
I’ve got some cables coming to connect some SATA drives to test that theory. Although I would like to get the 8 SAS drives working!
Also - I’ve got the BIOS installed on the card - will try wiping that and see if that works.
For interest - it now works in Windows 10 fine too.
My previous problem showed up if you know what you’re looking for.
When running SAS2Flash -list it would show NVDATA (default) as a different value to NVDATA (persistent). I think this happens when you update sometimes (or at least it happened to me). The symptoms were that you could see the card with up to date firmware but the drives still wouldn’t be visible (or indeed spin at all).
To get around this I wiped everything by booting into the EFI shell and running sas2flash -o -e 6 and then reinstalling the firmware. I couldn’t clear the bios running this in Ubuntu.
It sounds like the sort of thing which runs the risk of bricking the card - but I have no idea!! It worked for me and that’s all I know.