I have a Samsung SSD 860 EVO 2.5" SATA III 500GB which I'm trying to use as the OS installation drive for a newly-acquired PowerEdge R430 with 8 2.5" drive bays. I've installed the drive in a drive caddy and installed it into the front panel. I am confident that the disk is connected in such a way that the machine can interact with it:
- The light on the drive caddy illuminates when the machine is turned on (and I can "Blink" it from BIOS tools)
- When the Integrated RAID Controller is enabled:
- The "Integrated RAID Controller 1: Dell PERC Configuration Utility" tool shows a "Physical Disk" under "Physical Disk Management" with the right size (and, when I click into it, the right Model). Under "Controller Management", it shows Physical Disk Count: 1.
- System Diagnostics show a "Pass" for the Drive (when Integrated RAID controller is enabled)
However, when I boot from a (Fedora Server 38) USB drive to the OS installer ("Anaconda"), no Local Drives as a candidate for installation, and when I drop to terminal (with Ctrl-Alt-F1) lsblk does not show the SSD.
I have seen some threads suggesting that it's important to "turn on" SATA slots, but I'm not sure how to do so. In particular, in "System BIOS > SATA Settings", I see slots A-J (i.e. 10 - not the 8 I would have expected), none of which are configurable:
- When Embedded SATA=Off or AHCI, all of them are set to "Auto" (with the radio button greyed out) rather than "Off", Model=Not Enumerated, Drive Type=Not Enumerated, Capacity=N/A
- When Embedded SATA=RAID, the Model/Drive Type/Capacity entries and the "Off" radio buttons disappear, and only "Port ......(o) Auto" is present
Information:
- BIOS Version 1.2.6
- "System Utilities > Launch Diagnostics" shows "No Hard Drive" detected when the Integrated RAID Controller is disabled. However, when the Integrated RAID Controller is enabled, the tests passes.
- Advanced description of the SSD from the Integrated RAID Controller:
- Certified: No
- Logical Sector Size: 512B
- Physical Sector Size: 512B
- SMART Status: Enabled
- Revision: 2B6QS6PXNM0TB517
- SAS Address: 0x4433221100000000
- Physical Disk Power State: On
- Disk Cache Setting: Enabled
- Available Space: 465.250GB
- Used Space: 0KB
- Disk Protocol: SATA
- Negotiated Physical Disk Transfer Speed: 6.0Gb/s
- Encryption Capable: Yes
- Secured: No
- Protection Capable: No
- When I try to run the "Clear" Operation from the Physical Disk section of the RAID Controller (after converting it to RAID-capable), I get "The Phsyical Disk's security properties are not valid for the requested operation.". I don't know if that's relevant, but thought I'd mention it just in case.
- There are sometimes two PERCs showing up in Device Settings:
- When "Integrated RAID Controller" is enabled, "Integrated RAID Controller 1: Dell PERC Configuration Utility" is the top option
- When SATA mode is set to RAID, "DELL PERD S130 Configuration Utility" shows up as the bottom option. Even when the Integrated Controller is disabled, "View Physical Disk Properties" here shows "Unable to display physical disk properties as there are no physical disks currently detected" (recall that that Integrated Controller does "see" the disk)
I have tried:
- Every combination of BIOS/UEFI Boot Mode, AHCI/NONE/RAID SATA Mode.
- Switching the Drive to RAID-capable and enabling the Integrated RAID controller for RAID SATA Mode, and vice versa.
- Putting the drive in a different bay.
