this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
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Questions about blade server SSDs [ANSWERED] (kbin.run)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/selfhosted
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I recently bought a used blade server on the cheap (thank you LabGopher) to upgrade my home set-up and got one in pretty good shape. This is my first foray into blade servers and as I'm in the process of setting it up I'm running into some questions where I'm in a bit over my head trying to figure out.

The server has 4 x 3 TB SAS SSDs. I've installed Ubuntu Server 22.04 just fine. However these four disks show up as a single disk with all the partitions on it. fdisk and similar tools all just show a single sda drive. Furthermore, the total size of that combined disk is shown as 8.4 TB instead of the expected 12 TB.

Clearly I'm running into the 2.1 TB disk formatting limit on each of the four drives independently, but I'm not sure how to proceed. Ubuntu can't even see the missing space. My questions are:

  1. How do I recover my missing 3.6 TB? If I expand the partition to include all free space I just get the 8.4 TB, so it seems like it's a deeper limitation than just the OS, which I don't know how to handle.

  2. How do I get the drives to be individually visible? If I want to set up software RAID I need to have multiple devices accessible, instead of just this conglomerate drive.

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[–] VelociCatTurd 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It sounds like raid may already be configured through the bios. Have you checked that?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

You are totally right, it was RAID 5 setup in the BIOS. Thanks for your help.

[–] TechAdmin 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Sounds like the drives are combined with RAID 5. Could be hardware RAID card or software RAID as part of the BIOS. Server model number can be used to search for administrator manual and may have more info there. If it's hardware RAID card then try to find the model number & search for it's manual. If it's software raid at the BIOS level then motherboard/server manual will cover it. Should be some messages and prompts during boot related to it. Terms to look for 'RAID', 'storage controller', 'Perc', 'LSI'.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You were absolutely right, it was a RAID 5 setup that I had totally overlooked. Thank you! All better now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh duh, that makes sense. I didn't see any software RAID setup but wasn't looking for it specifically in the BIOS. Hardware RAID would also make sense. Thank you for the tips!

[–] blueeggsandyam 1 points 1 year ago

It could be in the bios or have a separate bios for the RAID system. Sometimes you will see it flash on screen as it boots. Like: F6 for RAID configuration

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Does it have a hardware RAID card? You may have to flash it to IT mode. The 'lost' drive may be just a parity drive?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Typically nobody is going to use raid 0 and give you access to all the drives. I suspect your system is set up for raid-5 so 3 drives are data one is parity.

When the system boots there'll be a prompt to press something like ctrl-D to enter disk setup then you can delete the raid array and set up each disk as individual drives.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

If it is a hardware raid, would the boot sequence offer a raid setup choice before the OS boots?