Problem with M5015 RAID and Seagate 15k.2 drives

[TechBoyJK]

I have several IBM X3650 M1 servers and bought an IBM M5015 RAID Controller because the onboard one wouldn't recongize Seagate SAS drives. It simply wouldn't initialize them, but I know that the onboard card was pretty much limited to IBM drives.

The IBM X3650 M2 actually came with the M5015 and IBM whitepapers have them testing the server with the same class of Seagate drives. I upgraded the firmware on the M5015 to the LSI 9260i counterpart, which is recommended.

I think I screwed up though. I had to order a new SAS cable, and I overlooked that the cable was only rated to 3Gbps.

So now, the raid controller sees the drives. It initializes them fine. However, it shows alert that "negotiated link speed is slower than maximum drive speed".

And even though I can use the drives to put them in a raid array; as soon as I try to write to the disks it craps out. When I reboot, I find that the RAID controller giving error

"fw could not sync up config/prop changes for some of the vd's/pd's" and it has kicked the drives out of the array and listed them as 'foreign, unconfigured, bad'.

I just ordered a SAS cable off monoprice. I don't know what else it could be. It works fine with my smaller, 3Gbps SAS IBM drives, but if I use the 6Gbps drives, no luck. I know the controller supports it, other people have used these drives with the controller, and the SAS expander cage (8 drives) also support 6Gbps (the original card also supported 6Gbps).

 

[Emulex]

Well if the cable is truly not acceptable at 6gbps, it may not be suitable for 3gbps either! Perhaps you just have a bad cable!

You can use MEGACLI to query the controller for status on the raid and number of PHY errors which is wiring between the drives and controller.

I assume your backplane is rated at 6gbps as well?

You can use megacli to drop the speed down to 1.5gbps iirc to truly drop off the speed to see if it is a problem with the cable/sas backplane!

 

[TechBoyJK]

Well if the cable is truly not acceptable at 6gbps, it may not be suitable for 3gbps either! Perhaps you just have a bad cable!

You can use MEGACLI to query the controller for status on the raid and number of PHY errors which is wiring between the drives and controller.

I assume your backplane is rated at 6gbps as well?

You can use megacli to drop the speed down to 1.5gbps iirc to truly drop off the speed to see if it is a problem with the cable/sas backplane!

Thanks.

I'm kind of lost trying these various megacli commands. I'm going to the cli of the RAID config, and while I can use the commands, I can't figure out how to page through the results. If it returns a big list, I only see the bottom results that fit on the page.

 

[Emulex]

in dos:
megacli --help |more

or in linux:
megacli --help | less

that's a pipe | and more is the pager utility or less

 

[TechBoyJK]

in dos:
megacli --help |more

or in linux:
megacli --help | less

that's a pipe | and more is the pager utility or less

I can't linux or dos onto the machine because I can't install an OS. I need the drives to work before..

I'm going into the cli via the RAID's BIOS, which doesn't even recognize pipe commands.....

 

[Emulex]

load freedos and use the megacli dos version! or learn to type CTRL-S and CTRL-Q to flow control the screen!