HP Z800 blind-mate docking SAS drive connector?

[CallofTheWild]

Hello, How do I put a 3.5" SAS drive in the blind-mate docking bay. Z800 docs say the board already contains SAS connection ports? I need to add just one SAS drive to the bay of 3 SATA drives. What works? Not connecting a SAS drive to a SATA port. SATA is too slow for a 15K spindle drive. Thoughts? Do I need to intall a SAS controler card? H-E-L-P. TIA 😉

[DGroves · Accepted solution]

please READ THE Z800 DOCUMENTATION, the user guide and the service manual are must have's

the z800 has a onboard LSI SAS/SATA controller chip that is attached to 7 SAS/SATA ports

reading the documentation will tell you all you need to know about which controller to use and how to configure raid arrays

for your current request, all you have to do is move the one drive bay connector from the SCU's sata ports to the LSI SAS/SATA ports and that bay will now be SAS/SATA capaple

[CallofTheWild]

The SAS drive fit perfectly into the drive bay and I moved the Bay 1 cable to the SAS to the SAS(0) controler plug. Bay(0) is still a SATA drive. I also connected all the remaining unused cables(2,3) to the SAS controler plugs as per the HP Service Doc.

The SAS Bios recognizes SAS drive but it can not be initialized. I tried a different SAS drive and had the same problem. I moved the dive to Bay(2) and changed the Bay(2) plug to SAS(0) controler plug thinking a blind connector might be faulty on Bay(1) but the drive still can't be initialized. I just purchased these used SAS drives on ebay and the seller said they worked, so it might be the Z800. Neither Windows 7 or my recovery disk partition manger can initialize it. I get a I/O error from both programs. I've never used the board SAS controller before. How do I know if it is working properly? Can't find any settings in Bios for SAS drives but during the boot, it shows SAS bios initializing. I'm not using Raid but could that be affecting the second HDD somehow?

[DGroves]

the SAS (and any SATA) drive must be under 2TB this is a hardware limitation covered in the manual

if you are just using the SAS drive as JBOD, (no raid) connect the drive to the sas controller,  if the LSI bios is enabled it will show the sas drive during the z800 boot sequence boot sequence 

if the LSI bios is disabled, no msg will be shown on boot, but the OS once booted will still find/see the drive (see below)

now once the OS has fully booted go to "disk manager" and select the SAS drive and initlise it to create a NTFS partition once that is done the drive icon will show 

for RAID:

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c01722374

[CallofTheWild]

I've tried everything you mentioned before you answered this question. (See question) At this point, it's either I bought two bad drives from ebay; the Z800 is mis-configured for SAS drives; the SAS controller is bad. You said the LSI bios may be disabled. It shows LSI bios SAS initializing when it boots with a few dots......... but can't see the name of the drive in bios. I does show up in the disk partition mangers I tried. See photos.  I don't have any proven SAS drives to try. What now?

[DGroves]

when the z800 bios is booting, during the LSI card init, it says to press "Ctrl C" to enter LSI card sub bios

please do this, and see if the drive is seen

i also need to know what the model number of the sas drive is

not all SAS drives are compatable with the LSI 1068e ROC controller chip/Z800 bios

[CallofTheWild]

The drive is a netapp x411_hvipc420a15 with 512 bytes per sector. See photo for full specs.

[DGroves]

yep, i thought the issue might be the drives themselves,....... just a heads up this can also affect SATA controllers as some controllers will not support the original SATA1.5GBps speed, and only work with 3/6GBps drives