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I have three supermicro servers, 2x 3U chassis with X8DTE motherboard and SAS-836TQ backplanes and 1x 1U chassis with X9DRW-iF with SAS-815TQ backplane.

1 of the 3U backplanes only recognizes 12 out of 16 drives (I've talked about this issue here), while the 1U backplane only recognizes 2 out of 4 drives.

I've been looking into ways to run diagnostics on the two backplanes, but not really getting anywhere. I noticed from the documentation that the backplanes have JTAG connectors for diagnostics, but I'm unfamiliar with how to use those.

I also tried installing SuperDoctor5 (SD5), but this doesn't seem to monitor the backplane itself. Super Diagnostics Offline (SDO) does seem to offer this functionality, but doesn't seem compatible with (older) X8 and X9 series motherboards.

Does anyone have any tips on how to further debug these issues?

Pieter Helsen
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  • On the 3U chassis: are the undetected disks powered? SAS drives light up when powered so that's pretty obvious. On the backplane each of the 4 molex power connectors powers 4 drives. Check that they're plugged correctly. If you're using SATA drives, wait 30s then pull one of the undetected drives and move it left to right: you should feel the gyroscopic effect if it was spinning. If not spinning -> power problem. – wazoox Mar 14 '22 at 15:52
  • The drives aren't spinning, but I've measured the voltages from the power cable feeding the molex connector, it's not the cable. So... busted backplane that's not feeding the power to the drives? – Pieter Helsen Mar 14 '22 at 20:32
  • Yes that can happen. If switching the power cables and the drives makes no difference than the backplane must be fried. – wazoox Mar 15 '22 at 21:23

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