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compability question


fluffy

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Hi,

 

I want to build a NAS based on a DELL T20 Server with an ARECA AR-1220 controller (passthrough) and a SSD drive for XPEnoboot 5.2-5644.5 running on ESXI 6.0

Installation of XPEonoboot went fine until I try to install DSM.

 

The NAS is found but during installation it says "no harddrives found" though it seems as the driver arcmsr is loaded successfully during boot time.

I tried several things, e.g. running a Windows 10 based VM with ARECA controller in passthrough mode on that ESXI hypervisor: after installation of ARECA drivers I can see and access the volumes of that controller.

 

 

Controller bios is latest.

 

Does anyone have an idea what went wrong and why the DSM installation does not see any drives?

 

Thanks in advance,

Ingo

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I've not used this card myself, but from experience of others, for testing, try,

 

disabling on-board sata or raid cards

disabling areca raid (I think you have anyway with passthrough mode), try set to jbod or other non raid modes

the card in another mobo

bare metal boot without ESXi

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Hi,

 

thank you for the response.

All of your ideas were already tested.

The card was running fine in another setup on different hardware (without ESXi).

Disabling the onboard SATA controller is not easily doable because it has a SSD connected which is used for the OS.

Currently only one HDD is connected to the ARC-1220 controller -> JBOD mode.

 

I am asking myself if it is a good idea at all to use that controller or would it be better, to connect 4 HDDs to mobos SATA controller and let DSM do the RAID5 stuff.

What do you think?

 

Regards,

Ingo

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I generally use the onboard sata for drives 1-4 (boot from USB) as I find it easier for updates etc and seems a shame to 'waste' a sata channel for a 30 second boot process :smile:

Regarding the T20 Server - does it have a management card to view device status, or are there any bios settings for enabling 'add in' cards? I vaguely remember some Dell systems needed to have pci slots 'enabled' etc.

Something else you could try is to install dsm on an onboard sata drive, then connect ssh to run some diagnostics on loaded drivers and hardware. could be that the areca drivers are loading in dsm, but some other hardware/software conflict is happening to stop drives showing up

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