My Experience Formatting Disks in a Dell Poweredge T20

chipmunkofdoom2 · Post by **chipmunkofdoom2** » 01 May 2015 15:31

Hello all. I recently purchased a Dell Poweredge T20 for a Nas4Free box and had some issues getting some disks set up and running. I figured out a work around and just wanted to share with the community in case anyone else has a similar experience.

I ordered a Dell Poweredge T20 specifically for a Nas4Free server (basic lower end x86 server, low power dual core Pentium, 4GB RAM, 4x SATA). When the server arrived, I had 2x 500GB HDD available, so I hooked those up to SATA ports 2 and 3 on the motherboard (available ports: 0, 1, 2, 3). I intentionally put these drives on ports 2 and 3 because my intent was to upgrade to newer HDDs when I had the money and those I wanted on ports 0 and 1. So, I installed Nas4Free to a USB thumb drive, saw my disks, formatted as a ZFS mirror and off I went. No issues whatsoever.

Two weeks ago I finally had saved up enough to add 2x 3TB HDD to the server. I ordered the drives and installed them, plugged them into ports 0 and 1. The drives didn't show up in the format list. I was able to import the drives, they showed as unformatted or unknown, but I couldn't format them. The only disks that showed in the format list were ada2 and ada3 (the 500GB HDDs). The 3TB HDDs showed in the Status > Disks menu and I could even see their SMART info, but I just couldn't get them to show in the format list. I did some reading and found a few links that provided scripts and suggestions (such as dding zeros to the entire drive). I tried all of these, but I still couldn't get my disks to show in the format menu. I even went so far as to boot an Ubuntu LiveCD, format the 3TB drives as NTFS and EXT4 to see if that would help, but it didn't.

At the end of my rope, I started looking at the SATA RAID and AHCI settings in the BIOS. The server came defaulted to RAID. I changed that to AHCI. Still no dice. The disks all showed up still, but I couldn't get them to show up in the format list. Only the 500GB drives, ada2 and ada3, showed. Desperate, I tried to switch the SATA mode to legacy ATA. When I booted up, I noticed something interesting. I could still only see disks ada2 and ada3 in the format menu, but this time, the disks had changed. One of the disks was a 3TB drive, the other was a 500GB drive. It looked like, for whatever reason, the only drives that would ever show up in that list were drives ada2 and ada3. I switched the SATA mode back to AHCI and moved the drives around. I moved the 500GB HDDs to SATA ports 0 and 1 and moved the 3TB HDDs to ports 2 and 3. Sure enough, when I powered on the server, I could still only see devices ada2 and ada3 in the format list, but this time the drives were my 3TB HDDs because I switched the ports around.

So, long story short, for some reason, on my hardware the only disks I can get to show up in the format menu are the ones plugged into my 3rd and 4th SATA ports, ports ada2 and ada3. If I recall correctly, I can also only build ZFS virtual devices out of devices on ada2 and ada3 as well. Once the disks are formatted and I've created my pools, I don't have any problems. I don't know if this is due to the built in SATA controller or what. I just wanted to share my experience in case it helped another user.

Any questions please let me know. Thanks to the community for, other than this small issue, such a great NAS distro!

arinci · Post by **arinci** » 01 May 2015 16:41

Quite strange, some months ago I installed 4xSeagate 3TB HDD into a Poweredge T20 and everything worked like a charm!
First of all be sure to have the sata controller in AHCI mode (check the BIOS config) and then go into Disk Management and press the "Rescan disks" button.

Sorry I cannot help you more, but really don't remember any trick to have all the disks available in Nas4Free!

Post by **b0ssman** » 01 May 2015 20:41

That was a lot of work when all you needed to do was sync your zfs pool in the gui tab.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

chipmunkofdoom2 · Post by **chipmunkofdoom2** » 06 Jul 2015 15:33

b0ssman wrote:That was a lot of work when all you needed to do was sync your zfs pool in the gui tab.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I tried that. I tried pushing literally every button I could in the GUI. Just to clarify, I wasn't trying to create a ZFS pool, the drives weren't showing at all under "devices" under Virtual Devices > Add Device. I was not able to format these drives, and subsequently build a virtual device with them, until they were on ada0 and ada1. A few months back I replaced the 500GB drives with two more 3TB drives and confirmed the behavior again.

erik · Post by **erik** » 21 Jul 2015 12:40

No problem with my Dell T20.
All disks visible, ZFS pool imported without problem.

erico.bettoni · Post by **erico.bettoni** » 21 Jul 2015 16:58

Have you tried replacing the cables?
And yes, leave the BIOS/Controller on AHCI and disable all hardware raid.

If that doesn't work maybe your mobo have a problem.

XigmaNAS