Hello,
I am running Debian 10 with an Epyc 7232P on an ASRock Rack ROMED8-2T
motherboard. All my packages are up to date, and I have upgraded
my motherboard's firmware to the latest version as well.
This motherboard has two MiniSAS HD connectors (SATA0_3 and SATA4_7)
which are capable of fanning out to 4 SATA drives each, for a total
of 8 SATA connections. I have connected 8 known-working drives via
these connectors; all 8 of the drives show up properly in the system
firmware configuration screens. However, only the drives attached
to SATA4_7 are detected by Debian.
I have performed several troubleshooting steps:
- swapping the cables used for each connector
- swapping the drives between cables
- booting with only one connector in use at a time
- upgrading to the latest kernel available in buster-backports (I
have since downgraded back to the kernel from the buster repository)
- attaching fewer drives to each cable
In all cases, the behavior was the same: all expected drives are
reported in the firmware, and the drives attached to SATA4_7 show
up in the OS (sd{a,b,c,d}), but the others are absent.
I have contacted ASRock support and they are unable to offer any
other ideas to try. They noted that the PCIe lanes used for SATA4_7
are shared with one of the motherboard's PCIe slots. Which connector
gets the lanes is controlled by two jumpers. However, the fact that
the drives appear for SATA4_7 indicates that I have configured my
jumper settings correctly. According to the block diagram[1] for
the motherboard, the PCIe lanes used by SATA0_3 are connected
directly to the processor.
There are a number of messages from libata in the dmesg logs, and
I can also provide lspci ouptut or anything else deemed useful.
However, none of the information I've been able to extract indicates
any errors, so I don't know what would be useful here. I'll wait
for prompting so I don't clutter the list with many lines of output.
Any help with this would be appreciated. Does anyone have experience
with this motherboard or SAS/SATA connections on the Epyc platform?
What other troubleshooting should I try?
Thank you,
Scott Colby
[1] the block diagram can be found on page 14 of the motherboard
manual at https://download.asrock.com/Manual/ROMED8-2T.pdf
