RedMag Mini won't mount an SSD on MAXPower RAID mini-SAS 6G-2e

[Peter Johnson]

So I upgraded my esata card to the MAXPower RAID mini-SAS 6G-2e from OWC and am using mini-sas to esata cables to plug in my drive docks and such as well as my RedMag mini reader (esata version). I am having no luck getting a RedMag to mount to my system. The reader will mount a mag when connected to my laptop via an esata express card so i don't think the reader is bad in anyway. A full size Red Station will mount a mag but not the mini reader.

Is there anybody else who has this problem? Is there a firmware update, perhaps for the mini reader or am I SOL?

Thanks,
Peter

 

[Zhang Ming]

SAS is not ESATA, i do not think it can be compatible, as my USB3.0 RedMAG can not run on USB2.0 port...

 

[Todd T]

the SAS interface spec includes backward compatibility for ESATA devices. Meaning that an ESATA drives will work on a SAS controller.
Do you have access to diagnostics to see if the controller physically sees the reader?

Zhang, USB 3 ports supply more power than the USB 2 ports. Are you using the auxiliary USB power cable when connecting your reader to a USB 2 port?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

SAS is downwardly compatible with [e]SATA. I don't have any experience with that particular SAS RAID card, so not sure. Do other eSATA devices connect properly? Hard drives, etc..? Also, am I understanding that a regular sized REDMAG reader with eSATA/FW800/USB2 connects via eSATA to the MAXpower card? Compatibility issues do happen on occasion, so far the REDMAG readers seem to play nice most of the time. There could be something between the REDMAG mini and that card that isn't compatible. You can start by talking to MAXPower about it, but most card manufacturers, in my experience, are less than helpful in these situations.

Have you tried powering-on the system with the REDMAG reader already connected with a SSD inserted? Reason I ask is that many SAS hosts, especially RAID-oriented ones, don't always support hot-swap ability on all devices and can be extra finicky with eSATA devices of certain types. The REDMAG mini reader uses a different internal SATA chipset than the full size reader, so while one works the other is not guaranteed to do so -- once again, minor compatibilities can and do happen. Even the ATTO cards, which are probably the best SAS/SATA adapters out there right now, have had their share of compatibility issues in the past. Quite a few really for the first 18 months or so when they released their 6Gbps cards. REDMAG reader units were never a problem, but many hard drives, especially port-multiplier units, were.

@Zhang Ming -- your REDMAG should run just fine on a USB2.0 port. Have you actually tried it? Really, you wouldn't want to do it if USB3 was available, but it does work. You may need to plug in the extra power cord -- yes, really, I've found the REDMAG mini likes to suck a lot of power and I get better performance by adding more power, some systems don't provide full USB power out of their ports, especially when USB3 ports are considered.

 

[Peter Johnson]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the reply. The regular sized REDMAG reader does work with the MAXPower card as well as all my other esata devices. I have an OWC RAID and several docks that I use with bare drives and they all work (except for port multiplication, but that's a different ball of wax). I am able to mount and unmount devices as needed. The MINI Reader works great with my laptop connected via an expresscard.

It's good to know that the MINI uses a different chipset than the full sized one as I suspected that was the issue. Perhaps I am SOL then since I doubt OWC will write a new firmware just for me and my little mini-reader. I suppose there is no firmware update for the minireader that would make it compatible.

I did try to power on the system with an SSD already inserted, but no luck. I'll try to see if I can get anything out of OWC as to what chipsets are compatible with their card.

Do you know just what chipset is in the mini-reader?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I have no idea what's inside the RED mini reader. If your card has issues with port multipliers, that could be an indicator of the issue. Many devices on the market use what can be described as an inverted port multiplier of sorts to provide more than one interface. So I'm thinking the mini reader may just be incompatible with this host adapter unless they update its drivers and firmware to better support port multipliers and/or hybrid interfaces. Typically these are the most problematic types of connections for SAS and SATA host adapters... In fact, most such adapters suffered from these sorts of almost random incompatibilities until very recently. I'd ask OWC and MAXPower about it, maybe they have an update in the works. Always worth asking.

 

[Peter Johnson]

I will contact them and find out. RED would know what chips are in the mini-reader right? Who would I ask at RED that would know. (you may not know, but I have a hunch you might)

 

[Tom.Wong]

the real question is, is that card an HBA or sas card? there is a difference. the biggest confusion is always between those two because they both use the same port/cable. but a HBA is meant to read disks JBOD, up to 4 drives per port. you connect a sas cable to a 4 bay rack or desktop hard drive enclosure via SAS cable with a hba, 4 drives will pop up on your desktop. and than you can either leave them JBOD, and hot swap them for a lot of individual drive interface, or you can software stripe them.

a sas card only recognizes the drives via the utility it comes with, and can only set it up in a raid. You may be able to set it up JBOD as well but I haven't tried this and don't think it's gonna turn up the same way as you would with an HBA.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Tom? HBA stands for Host Bus Adapter. All SAS, SATA, USB3, etc.. PCIe cards are "HBA's". SAS, or Serial Attached SCSI, is a serial type interface and SATA is a subset of the SAS standard, directed more at the consumer market. SATA uses less power and allows for shorter cable runs and a few other differences. By definition all SAS adapters support connection to SATA devices, but SATA is not upward compatible with SAS. A proper SAS HBA will allow you to connect SATA devices to it and operate just as if you were attaching to a SATA HBA. SATA and SAS use the same cabling and connectors, the 4-channel "SAS connectors" are usually just found on SAS devices and drive enclosures or RAIDs. They're a great way to incorporate multiple connectors into one cable.

The behavior you're talking about in terms of SAS cards and only recognizing via a utility is typical of RAID HBA's. And this goes for both SAS or SATA RAID controllers, or other types of RAIDs. Typically you have to go into the utility and define a certain device as being on a separate RAID volume as a JBOD entity. Not a problem for most controllers, however, most RAID controllers don't like hot-swapping out JBOD disks and they see each REDMAG SSD (or any other drive) as a different entity each time you swap it out, making it a pain to deal with. Some RAID hosts allow you to define zones and default behavior for such devices, but most out there will simply mount newly attached and undefined devices as a JBOD or plain disk volume.

His SAS HBA is indeed a RAID host and there may be some more info available in his RAID management tool. So I guess that is a good question of whether or not the REDMAG mini with SSD installed does show up in his management software? I'm doubting that it does, as it seems other drives, including the full size REDMAG reader, seem to mount and run fine.

One other limitation that people run into with SAS controllers is a limitation of the hardware and mixing devices. Each SAS "host" or "header" can have up to 4 channels. You can not mix and match SAS and SATA devices on the same header. On some HBA's you can't mix devices at all due to how they may have implemented their firmware or power management. The ATTO SAS cards are nice because they keep their hosts separated as far as interface and power are concerned, so you can have a SAS LTO drive on one header and a fan-out to 4X eSATA devices on another header.

 

[Zhang Ming]

the SAS interface spec includes backward compatibility for ESATA devices. Meaning that an ESATA drives will work on a SAS controller.
Do you have access to diagnostics to see if the controller physically sees the reader?

Zhang, USB 3 ports supply more power than the USB 2 ports. Are you using the auxiliary USB power cable when connecting your reader to a USB 2 port?

Actually I didn't make my description clear, my redmag can work on MacBookPro's USB2 port, but not on my PC's (on USB3 ports in the same machine it's totally fine), and I plugged the power supply, I think there must be some compatible problem with my mainboard, but anyway I will replace the whole machine soon so I didn't pay much attention. my meaning is there may be compatible problem if using different protocol with RED's equipments, also same with many "PRO" level computer parts according to my experience, because they are not face the common users so compatible is not highly guaranteed.

I made quite a lot of raid systems years ago for my company's internet services, expensive lessons... compatible problems always made my head pain, especially when making storage network(there were only scsi and fiber raid at that time, but just different scsi can cause problems very often, many fiber cases only guarantee certain model disks and Qlogic cards has different model made some card just do not work on some fiber cases... BLABLBLA, so I would never try using SATA on a SAS raid) . Also I think Jeff provided the best help.

 

[Zhang Ming]

Hi Jeff,
Since you must had tried quite a lot of raid system recently, do you think SAS raid will be better than SATA raid? I am considering to buy a LSI 9270 or 9260(SAS/SATA) with Seagate ES.2 disks, SAS disks here are much more expensive than the SATA disks although they are the same on everything except the interface controller according to the documents. I think theoretically SAS will do better when heavy write and read at the same time, is it true? Or I can just save 30% money and buy the SATA ES.2 disks?

ZhangMing

 

[Lucas Wilkinson]

Not sure if this has been solved but I had the same issue. i fixed it by using another USB 3 cord. The RED cord was dodgy, I tried it on one of my USB powered spinning drives and it wouldn't mount either. Hope this helps.