[SOLVED] SpinRite 6.1 on a crossflashed Dell RAID card (IT Mode)

[PandaMHz]

Hello everyone,

Been a long time user of SpinRite and I think I came across my first potential issue, ever.

I got myself a used Dell PowerEdge T340, and I was planning on installing TrueNAS on it. No problems there, did some quick research online to find out that these servers come with proprietary firmware (I assume to be controlled by iDRAC, etc). The articles I found strongly suggest flashing the card into IT mode to allow full control, full disk pass-through over to TrueNAS, in order to be able to do ZFS pools and everything else without hinderance. This was my understanding of it, so I ended up flashing it into IT mode.

TrueNAS then reported no issues, being able to access and control each individual drive connected to the backplane and at full speeds as well. Very nice.

Recently, I decided to run SpinRite on the server. The server supports both UEFI and Legacy which is ideal.

SpinRite loads up correctly as you would expect, but seems to see every SATA drive as SAS, it is unable to report the drive hours and when running benchmarks, it can't go past 44MB/s. I tested this again with an SSD on the backplane and that can't go over 44MB/s through the backplane. Connecting this to a SATA port on the motherboard does work as expected, SpinRite sees the SATA drive, sees the drive hours and is able to reach maximum benchmark speeds.

Is there anything I can do in order to have SpinRite see each drive correctly when connected to the backplane ?

Thank you ever so much for your time reading this.

 

[PHolder]

Steve spent his time on common IDE and SATA devices that his testers had ready access to. He generally avoided special purpose devices such as RAID cards because they're not commonly available. He also never spent any time on SAS or other "enterprisey" type drives or configurations. Having not spent time on drivers for specialty hardware, it's likely all he recognizes is whatever the machine's BIOS reports, which would likely also explain the slower speeds. Your likely best bet would be to extract the drives and use them with a controller that SpinRite is known to support.

 

[PandaMHz]

Steve spent his time on common IDE and SATA devices that his testers had ready access to. He generally avoided special purpose devices such as RAID cards because they're not commonly available. He also never spent any time on SAS or other "enterprisey" type drives or configurations. Having not spent time on drivers for specialty hardware, it's likely all he recognizes is whatever the machine's BIOS reports, which would likely also explain the slower speeds. Your likely best bet would be to extract the drives and use them with a controller that SpinRite is known to support.

That makes perfect sense. I appreciate it, thank you.

 

[Scott]

That makes perfect sense. I appreciate it, thank you.

Even though you’ve connected SATA drives to the RAID controller, the controller does not respond to AHCI commands. Most RAID controllers are made by Broadcom and use a command set called MPI. Spinrite does not know how to talk to those controllers, even if using SATA drives, not SAS drives.

Here’s a really good overview of the Broadcom HBA architecture

Broadcom (LSI/Avago) HBA and RAID Controller Technical Discussion

Broadcom (former LSI, Avago) HBAs and RAID controllers are very popular in STH, FreeNAS and other communities. In spite of their popularity there is a surprising lack of clear technical details and a lot of ambiguity about these cards. There are some good forum and blog posts delving into some...

forums.servethehome.com

 

[PandaMHz]

Even though you’ve connected SATA drives to the RAID controller, the controller does not respond to AHCI commands. Most RAID controllers are made by Broadcom and use a command set called MPI. Spinrite does not know how to talk to those controllers, even if using SATA drives, not SAS drives.

Here’s a really good overview of the Broadcom HBA architecture

Broadcom (LSI/Avago) HBA and RAID Controller Technical Discussion

Broadcom (former LSI, Avago) HBAs and RAID controllers are very popular in STH, FreeNAS and other communities. In spite of their popularity there is a surprising lack of clear technical details and a lot of ambiguity about these cards. There are some good forum and blog posts delving into some...

forums.servethehome.com

Thank you for your explanation and that link is really useful! Cheers