Dell PERC 6i failed?

That would be the trouble. It looks like the arbitrary 6 is a software member ID and not necessarily linked to a physical location either as witnessed above in my first post when I moved the cables around and you can see the member disks show up on another location.

I think the most concrete thing I have to go on is the SAS address and the connector number. The connector being the big 8484 connector that narrows it down to four disks.

Example picture.
 
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It should be the 3rd drive on that cable. Does your cable have numbers? If you haven't scrambled the drives from when you created the array the SW numbers should be correct.
 
This is what I am thinking the cable layout is, make sense?

managerf.png


cardj.png
 
Well I guessed right and found disk 6 as confirmed by removing it and then starting the machine and looking at the boot configurator.

Pulled the drive and seatools doesn't see anything wrong with it, but one odd thing is seatools sees TWO of these drives attached. Disk is attached to an eSATA connector, think that has anything to do with it?
 
Seems unlikely, but you never know. If you do the long test with Seatools and it passes, I'd try a rebuild onto the drive and see what happens.
 
I ran a long test till about 75% which was like three hours and then I had things to do. I was hoping it would fail and I could send it in with the right failure code and get it replaced while I was out for the next two weeks. I'll do the long test and I guess if it passes I'll zero write it to clear the configuration and make it look like a new disk and try it again.
 
Disk 6 ejected again, same as last time. I'm just going to get an advanced replacement this time.
 
Advanced replacement failed quickly too, so I guess it wasn't the disk.

I ordered a new cable and replaced it, then the rebuild went fine. Hope that was it.

Has me wondering if the first issue I had may have been cabling.
 
That's the same cable I bought when I first got my Perc cards. I've since been using the cheap cables from China and haven't gone back to this one.
 
They run $150-175 ish on eBay with battery and there doesn't seem to be a shortage of them. RAID5/6 performance is really good for the money.
 
Bozo said:
I see the Perc cards are really popular here. Why are they so much better than other RAID cards?
Click to expand...

They're cheap, plentiful and they play nice with SATA disks and SAS expanders, which I've heard that some RAID cards do not. You can also build an array across multiple cards if you've got 'em. They're a sure bet for a working configuration.

It was cheaper for me to get six 8-port Perc5s than it was to get a single 16-port 3ware.
 
I wasn't aware I could span an array across two cards. What would be a use case for this and how well does it work? If I'm understanding this, does that mean I could populate all 8 ports on both adapters and essentially make a single RAID6 array containing 16 disks? Does one Perc BIOS simply recognize the second card?

I tried using both my Perc 6i in my NAS but the system won't POST with both installed. I used both 16x PCIe slots and threw a classic PCI video card in, but it won't display anything or boot. I'm guessing it's something to do with my motherboard. Each card works fine and both PCIe 16x slots work fine independently.
 
They're supposed to work that way. I'll admit I haven't tested that configuration because I traditionally use softRAID.
 
I've had 2 PERC6i card in a single PC before. They each had their own 8 drive RAID-6 array on them. I didn't try any sort of 16 drive RAID-6 array.
 
Handruin said:
I tried using both my Perc 6i in my NAS but the system won't POST with both installed. I used both 16x PCIe slots and threw a classic PCI video card in, but it won't display anything or boot. I'm guessing it's something to do with my motherboard. Each card works fine and both PCIe 16x slots work fine independently.
Click to expand...

I'd look at the smbus taping issue thing in the link you have above. I didn't have to do it but then again I may have gotten lucky. Not sure what the symptoms are if that's a problem. Beyond that I think the cards need the same bios version at least.
 
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