Strange issue with PE840 and 2TB drives

[bigtwenty]

Ok, this is a little strange. I bought a Poweredge 840 server off eBay and it came with a PERC 5/i card in it. My goal was to load it with 4 2TB drives and make a file server. Well, the issue is that when I go into the PERC bios, it only sees three drives out of four. It gets weirder still. It will only see drive 0,1 and 3. Drive 2 does not show up, even if i swap the cabling between let's say drive 3 and 2. Drive 2 still does show (the theory being if it were a bad drive or cable, the non showing drive would follow the change.

Wait, it gets weirder still. I can take out the 2tb drive and put in lets say a 1tb drive and it sees all four drives. three 2tb and 1 1tb. Wait, it gets weirder still. I can put the 1TB drive in port 0 and the three 2TB drives in 1,2 and 3 but again port 2 doesnt show. The ONLY WAY I can get all the drives to show is to put the 2TB drives in port 0,1 and 3 and then put a smaller drive on port 2.

I have upgraded all firmware and drivers on the system to no avail. Im wondering if its a limitation on this card but i've never seen that and no one else seems to have either. I can contact Dell as this is out of warranty. I was also thinking it might be a PSU limitation as I know those 2TB drives take a lot of power. What I haven't tried was to see if just one 2TB drive on port 2 shows up. Maybe port 2 has a limitation for some weird reason.

Any thoughts would be helpful.

 

[normntwrk]

I would try calling Dell anyway, I had a server out of warranty and they helped me rebuild a drive that dropped out of the array

Norm

 

[jkupski]

IIRC, the server comes with lifetime phone support, even if the warranty is expired. Actually fixing the problem is on your dime, but you should have no difficulty talking to a tech and getting a case opened.