Modding a Dell Perc 6 / Dell H310 / Dell H710 (other LSI 1078 or 9223-8i based) SAS Raidcontroller

Last week I was working on my new fileserver. To ensure my data will be a bit safer I will use a RAID solution. In my storage I had a Dell Perc6 controller, perfect for my needs. There was just one problem, when installed my server didn't boot.

I heard about it before, use tape to mask 2 pins in the PCI-E bus. After searching a bit more I found exactly what these 2 pins do, and I took the step and it works like a charm.

The pins you need to mask are:

B5 (SMCLK, SMBus clock) an B6 (SMDAT, SMBus data)

When these two are masked you are blocking the SMBus signals, now they cannot interrupt the boot process anymore. In the past there where only some vague guidelines for this, not real standard, which lead to a variety of different implementations, which in the current time lead to issues with new motherboards who do follow the now current standards.

If you want to apply this mod as well, you may do so with some insulation (electrical) tape or paint you use on nails. I do recommend the first one.

As you can see on the picture on the right I used the tape. You must only cover these 2 pins on THIS side of the controller, you mustn't tape the other side!

I hope this will help some other people in the future.

This has been tested and found working on Perc5 controllers as well!


p.s. this was tested with this hardware
SuperMicro H8SGL-F
AMD Opteron 6166HE
4x4GB ddr3 ecc reg
ESXi 5 (boot from usb)
2x2TB Seagate (attached to the perc6)

Later on I successfully added the 2x2TB as a mirrored RAID setup to my ESX as a datahost.
This Perc6 can only see harddisks up to 2TB, if I ad 3 TB harddisks it only sees 2.1TB

Update:
This raidcontroller has been moved to another system with the same mod, and it works perfectly.
ASRock P67 Extreme 4
Intel I3 3220T
2x2GB DDR3
8x2TB attached to the perc 6



Also confirmed working on the folowing cards:
IBM SR M1115
Dell Perc5
Dell H310

And probably all other LSI 1078 and LSI 9223-8i bases controllers.

Cheers,

Yannick

Welcome to my first Blogpost. This blog will be used to chat about technology and hardware. I will share my findings about a variety of different builds, tests and other issues whom might be interesting for other people to reed. I myself focus on the server-market and enterprise environments, you will most likely find blogs about these subjects.

I am Dutch, but IT is really English minded, and since a big part of the world's population understand it, why not write in English? 

I hope you enjoy my blog, and I hope it one day may help you!

Cheers,

Yannick