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I recently purchased two refurbished Supermicro SC836TQ (3U, 16bay) chassis with SAS backplanes (Standard SAS836-TQ planes).

One works perfectly fine, but the other fails to recognize/initialize any disks installed in the right-most column.

Unfortunately, I'm a little out of my depth in this, so I'm looking for common causes and/or ways to troubleshoot or fix.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Pieter Helsen
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  • Do both hosts have the same CPUs installed? – Eleasar Feb 28 '22 at 13:24
  • Both have a single CPU installed. The one with the fully-functioning backplane has an Intel Xeon E5506 installed while the one with the partially-functioning backplace sports an Intel Xeon E5620. – Pieter Helsen Feb 28 '22 at 15:42
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    Interesting, I thought a lack of PCIe lanes may be the problem, but the E5620 (5520 Chipset) feature more PCIe lanes than the E5506 (5500 Chipset). I am assuming the SC836TQ uses a PCIe RAID Controller. If so, have you checked all the cables between the backplane and the controller? – Eleasar Feb 28 '22 at 18:14
  • Correct, they're both Areca ARC-1280ML's. I just swapped all fourth row SATA cables (including the sideband connector) with the third row cables. Third row continued to work, while fourth row was still unresponsive. I wasn't able to switch the molex power cables, since they were snapped on real tight. – Pieter Helsen Feb 28 '22 at 21:04
  • Tested the molex connectors using a bit of copper and a volt meter. Red correctly measured 5 volts, while yellow was correctly measuring 12 volts. So we can rule out a cable issue. – Pieter Helsen Mar 02 '22 at 18:07
  • Hmm, it could just be a broken backplane. You could try switching the two backplanes if they're identical, but that would probably be quite a bit of work. Have you checked the BIOS for any obvious settings (or even reset it)? Maybe the link-speed of the RAID Controller is setup wrong, but that seems a bit far fetched? – Eleasar Mar 03 '22 at 10:50

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