HP Z1 G5 Workstation - I need a RAID controller for this.

[Fly_agaric]

Wow, I spent lots of time with it today (new cable arrived, so I went to work), and that was quite something.

I figured why the firmware config tool is not available. It is handled by the Starup Menu - there's separate option in it:

'3rd party option ROM management' available also after pressing F3. All option ROMs are listed there: NIC, integrated fakeRAID and Adaptec, too. All options are available, but handled via HP own interface - looks different than Adaptec. Right after connecting the cable and drives it hung on the startup menu... Yup.

I got really annoyed, so brought an old EliteDesk 8300 to the test room and moved the controller to it. Man, in there it started talking... It shows everything the traditional Adaptec way, and all communication is shown from the ROM-post. Right away I saw: 'Fatal error: Controller kernel panic!! Unknown Firmware error- press key!' after pressing it "BIOS not installed'

Figured, I'll try to flash most recent FW then. maxView installed correctly in EliteDesk on Windows, so I used this to upgrade FW successfully.

Only after that the controller alone (still no drives connected) started behaving OK and does not cause any hangs, and OS loads OK. I decided to connect the SSD's then, and ... more problems:

- no matter how I connect them, and which cable I use (I tried both) it only sees one SSD at a time.

Seriously, browsing through options in the option ROM keeps showing only one SSD. I tried booting Windows fully and using Adaptec's maxView instead of options-ROM and same situation - only one drive visible.

Either this controller is faulty some way, or I don't really know what to try next with it... Running out of ideas.

[DGroves]

i strongly recommend you stop trying things willy nilly all it does is usually waste time

since you have a different system that the asr card behaves normally in use that AND ONLY  THAT TO TROUBLESHOOT

what model is this system?

on the ASR card, what model do you have and which firmware revision is it? many ASR cards are OEM and will not take the retail adaptec firmware

which model SSD is working and does it work on all 4 cable ports?

which mini sas connector are you using? the asr-71605 has four you should be using the port that shows the drive ID# as 0

you need to tell the asr card which port(s) is being used for RAID OR JBOD or if all ports are one or the other

have you read the asr cards user manual? or are you simply trying things willy nilly?

http://download.adaptec.com/pdfs/user_guides/adaptec_raid_controller_iug_6_2015.pdf

[Fly_agaric]

It may sound chaotic, but there's a lot going on here. Anyways, nothing done "nilly willy". I'm just trying to recognise the situation here. Obviously need to try everything to know what's what. Cable is in the port 0, and I do have that PDF. In fact I think I have a newer version, as this one is bit outdated.

Nothing on the controller shows it is an OEM one - just the opposite: marked clearly as Adaptec ASR-71605, all details here:

I use these drives:

https://www.adata.com/us/consumer/591 - 2TB version, only because we had these on the stock.

I spent some more time with it today and have more facts, but no success still.

Since it shows all communication during POST, and you advise that too, I stuck to using old EliteDesk 8300 box (destination would be Z1 G5 Entry Tower Workstation). Looks, like your experience reaches the older ones too (as mine does), but believe me - it all looks different in the newer ones. ARC Utility (the CTRL+A one) is not shown any more and is handled in quite weird way.

Back to subject, I had to make sure the controller and cable are fine, so chose to test it with 3 identical laptop drives I had (500GB HGST 7200rpm, 6Gb/s, don't remember exact model name) and it worked a charm! I used ARC Utility, all of them visible and available. Initialised, created RAID 5, then tested it in Windows - all fine. It clearly proves that Adaptec and the cable are fine... At least, it's some consolation.

I cleared the config in ARC Util, powered off and replaced the HDD's with 2TB SSD's. Powered EliteDesk 8300 back again, CTRL+A and... no joy - still showing only one drive.

So my conclusion would be: controller doesn't like these particular drives (I don't have other brand to try), or it doesn't like 2TB SSD's. Not sure what else  could be playing a role here.

For the moment I'm taking a break of it, since I will not be in the office for the next 10 days, but would still appreciate any comments, or ideas from you.

[DGroves]

i would recommend using the ASR cards onboard bios rather than the arcutil

the asr card supports large drives for booting (GPT format) or up to 3TB in legacy (MBR) mode i have personally connected 4 kingston 128GB ssd's to this card in raid 5/0 modes along with two 1TB mech drives in JBOD (and raid 0) configs for testing the card i suspect your missing something in regards to the ssd's there may be existing info on the drives that the card is seeing and getting confused read up on how to remove any existing data from the ssd's to return them to a clean "raw" state

[Fly_agaric]

This ARC Util is the BIOS thing, this is just how they call it. I start catching their jargon after spending so much time with it...

That's not even going to be the booting partition, so I'm not worried about that. Drives are in RAW state. I tested them 1 by 1, by connecting them to them MoBo directly and that's how they were seen. But I will re-check that all, just to be sure, when I'm back in the office.

Maybe I'll get other SSD's to test it, in smaller capacity (256, or 512), as something tells me it's the size+drive being SSD that confuses the controller.

I will update the thread whenever I get something new. Hopefully, this thread helps someone in similar situation.

Anyway, your involvement and help is much appreciated. Thanks!

[DGroves]

i have not tested multiple 2TB SSD's on this controller due to cost/benefits of doing so

i (and others) will be interested if smaller ssd'd do work,

can you provide the current Adata 2TB ssd model/firmware that appears to have a problem

you can also email adaptec support and Adata on this issue

[Fly_agaric]

I forgot to update the call last week, so doing it now, after even more tests.

I tested 4x 480GB Sandisk SSD's, then Samsung 850Evo 500GB (x4) in RAID5 and no problems. Tested 2x 1TB Sandis SSD's in a STRIPE - no problem. Tested 3x 3TB WD Red HDD's - no problem.

All tests were conducted on separate older machine, but it's pretty safe to assume, controller works fine.

Still not sure about what went wrong - are the ADATA SSD's source of the problem here, or their size + them being SSD's? 

I will know that the next time I'm about to receive 2TB SSD's (we're buying Crucials now), but that isn't soon to happen.

Next test I'm going to conduct will be connecting ASR-71605 to that new G5 Workstation it initially worked in. The way it handles 3rd party hardware is interesting and I'm curious to know if it can work OK together. I'll try getting some pictures regarding the latter.

Since your idea of getting an ASR controller worked, I am marking it as a solution. Persons to read that in the future need to remember, we still don't have final test conducted on the G5 Workstation - hopefully, soon to happen.