HBA Cards for Modern Motherboards and OS

[TeleFragger]

Ok so I have been pulling what little hair I have left out. I understand, from googling and searching this site, that enterprise hardware (HBA) on consumer products is what it is...

I have an i5-6500k where I have had an HP H220 and 36 port expander running for years. Blunder on my end, resulted in me having a spare MSI Z-690-A DDR4 board and i3-12100F. It all works, I can install any OS I want, etc... but I cannot get this bugger to see my HBA Card. I did go into the bios and set UEFI to CSM and now my H220 shows up!!!! that seems great; however, not so great. System starts to go but never scans or works...

so now I am back to my old motherboard and having issues..


my question to you all well smarter than me (I am so out of the hardware side these days) is...

What SAS card or device allows me to get 40 hard drives seen in Windows 11, Server 2022 on a standard MSI Z690-A motherboard. If the HP H220 is old and needs Legacy mode, then what card does not and should work? I just want to buy what I need and get my plex storage server back up and running!!!!
thx in advance.

 

[Dopamin3]

What's the current firmware version you're on? Have you just tried updating the firmware on the H220? https://support.hpe.com/connect/s/product?language=en_US&kmpmoid=5263565&tab=driversAndSoftware Alternatively consider trying crossflashing it with LSI firmware https://www.truenas.com/community/r...9300-9305-9311-9400-94xx-hba-and-variants.54/

I've used a few LSI cards on P19 firmware (9201-16i) or P20 firmware (9211-8i) on consumer motherboards (Asrock X370 Taichi and Gigabyte X570S Aero G) and all the drives are detected and work fine. Note: I use IT mode on the firmware because I'm using OpenZFS but traditional RAID you would use the normal firmware. I never had to tweak any BIOS settings to get all drives presented to the OS. But conversely I've never used really old firmware versions.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

In addition to enabling CSM, you have to also enable "interrupt 19 capture", which is usually somewhere else in the UEFI setup.

This option allows things like RAID and HBA controllers to interrupt the boot process to load their own BIOS. Not having it enabled is most likely the reason it never loads correctly.

 

[TeleFragger]

In addition to enabling CSM, you have to also enable "interrupt 19 capture", which is usually somewhere else in the UEFI setup.

This option allows things like RAID and HBA controllers to interrupt the boot process to load their own BIOS. Not having it enabled is most likely the reason it never loads correctly.

i broke the motjerboard connecting it and unplugging it a lot. did thisswapping boards around trying to get one working. gonna haveta send it back to msi noe...

 

[TeleFragger]

What's the current firmware version you're on? Have you just tried updating the firmware on the H220? https://support.hpe.com/connect/s/product?language=en_US&kmpmoid=5263565&tab=driversAndSoftware Alternatively consider trying crossflashing it with LSI firmware https://www.truenas.com/community/r...9300-9305-9311-9400-94xx-hba-and-variants.54/

I've used a few LSI cards on P19 firmware (9201-16i) or P20 firmware (9211-8i) on consumer motherboards (Asrock X370 Taichi and Gigabyte X570S Aero G) and all the drives are detected and work fine. Note: I use IT mode on the firmware because I'm using OpenZFS but traditional RAID you would use the normal firmware. I never had to tweak any BIOS settings to get all drives presented to the OS. But conversely I've never used really old firmware versions.

see attached

 

[TeleFragger]

Got it all working back on old motherboard. copying files back to it and getting it situated. I wanted to use the newer motherboard to also install plex on this to remove a pc... guess until i get the motherboard fixed, not gonna happen yet.

 

[zandor]

Did you try booting off some other device and just using the array for storage? You likely won't even need legacy mode if you're booting off of something else as long as you have working drivers for the old HBA. If you boot off something else you can generally disable the bios on an HBA and just let the OS and drivers deal with it. Leave secure boot on, etc.

Using a Z690 board and an i3-12100F I'd grab a small M.2 drive to boot off of. For older hardware without M.2 slots I'd just get a little SATA SSD for a boot drive. I run an i3-10100 in my home server. Boots off a 512GB M.2, 2TB M.2 for fast storage (10Gb network so it actually does me some good) and of course HDs for bulk storage. A 256GB would have been enough for a boot drive, but the difference in price per GB made me cringe so I bought a slightly larger drive. Probably wasted $20 or $30 there.