Ok. Did a bunch more testing here tonight.
I have 2x 8tb SAS drives that have worked for several weeks now. Those show up in bios reliably regardless of which connector I use. So I think the HBA is working and the cables are good.
Of the 10x 10tb drives, 1 drive shows up reliably. It also seems to work on any connector I use. But it is the only drive the works.
Here is 8 of the 10 installed and only one showing in BIOS. I think the other 7 are not even spinning up.
An additional weird thing is that at least 1 other of the 10 drives did show up the first time I plugged it in from inside the xpenology VM. I did ‘hot swap’ that one in, but it then passed a SMART test. But since it passing the test and me pulling it, it hasn’t worked again. I’m also not positive which drive it is because originally I wasn’t expecting things to behave so weirdly, so I didn’t start taking notes…
As another test, I got a hold of a 9305-16i to see if the drives would read on that. And while that card would show up in BIOS, none of the drives – including the 8th that have always worked – showed up or spun up at all! I wonder if that card is not compatible with my mobo?
Is it possible other BIOS settings are interfering?
On the 9300-16i, I have been seeing the connected drives under a ‘physical drives’ menu that appears if drives are connected… on the 9305 I did not…
Would you expect the drives to spin up on boot?
I’ll try booting into proxmox and running lshw on both cards tomorrow. Thanks for the route to test!