LSI HBA -> IBM Drive Cage -> HD problem

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I have a 6-drive IBM hot-swap SATA cage with 6 Toshiba DT01ACA300 SATA3 3TB hard drives, connected via 6 SATA ends of two SFF-8087-to-SATA hydra cables to an LSI 9201-16i SAS/SATA HBA flashed to IT mode.

I'm getting a lot of drive command CRC errors, with no effective talking at all to any of the drives. My strong hypothesis is that, although the drives are detected as SATA3 6Gbps, something in the drive cage is limiting communications to either SATA1 or SATA2 level. On a Linux box, using this same cage, I found I had to limit communications to either SATA1 or SATA2, at which point the setup worked well.

Now I have moved the hardware to an otherwise-working-fine FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE box, and no joy at all with these drives.

My question is, exactly what is my procedure to limit communication to SATA1 or SATA2? I imagine it is some form of hint in loader.conf, but I have no clue whatsoever exactly how to form the hint.

All the drives are showing up as connected to mps0, bus 0, scbus 0, targets 0-5, lun 0.
 
I don't know how to do this in the mps driver. But I've used a lot of the LSI 9xxx cards, and they have an extensive setup mechanism. Maybe you should convince the LSI HBA to not try SATA3; that might be less trouble than trying to adjust the OS. Look into their setup screens, and see what they say.

The LSI customer support also seems to be friendly and competent.
 
Thanks. It sounds like a reasonable suggestion, but as far as I can see, the LSI setup is utterly trivial and doesn't do squat. Maybe it does more in IR mode, but I'm in simple IT mode.

I did go to the trouble of laying out the drives by themselves on the table and hooking everything up, and it works like a charm. The drives are, believe it or not, SATA3. So it's definitely a limitation of the cage, but OTOH I know it should be able to make it work, because I've done it in Linux.
 
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