The following problem occurs with Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 and 2012 R2, Datacenter or Standard.
I have an external SAS enclosure with seven optical drives and one hot-swap SAS/SATA bay that connects using two SFF-8088 connectors (no internal SAS expander, etc.). The purpose is to use the seven bluray writers to write multiple copies of a large database simultaneously. The optical drives are also occasionally used to read datasets that come on multiple discs (usually 8-12 per dataset and up to 15 datasets at a time). Because of the volume, more optical drives are definitely better. Regardless of the type of SAS controller used to connect this enclosure, some significant functionality is always missing.
For writing, it is best to connect directly to the optical drives (which do their own buffering) so a HBA would seem better than a hardware RAID controller. I have tried several HBAs, including LSI-9211, LSI-9240-IT, Dell H310-IT. In all cases, Windows only sees four DVD drives and the hot-swap bay. The drives Windows sees work perfectly for reading and writing. MegaRAID Storage Manager (LSI controller software) sees all seven optical drives and the hot-swap bay. LSI says this must be a Windows problem. Strangely, if I remove (any) three optical drives and replace them with hot-swap bays, all eight devices are recognized by Windows.
If I use a true RAID controller (tried LSI-9260, Dell H800, Dell H810, HP 812P, IBM 5015), windows and MSM see all seven drives and the hot-swap bay, reads from the optical drives are fine, but writing large discs times out (presumably because of buffering by the RAID card) so I can't write DVDs.
Is there a way to get Server to recognize all seven optical drives on an HBA? Ideally, I'd like to add several of these enclosures but I can't even get one working properly!
The system is a Tyan (Dell) MB with dual Xeon E5-2620s and 64Gb RDIMM. Currently includes LSI-9260 (2Tb SAS 10k in RAID 0), Dell H810 (32Tb SAS in RAID 6), and LSI-9211 (optical enclosure + 3Tb hot-swap). Just installed Server 2012 R2 Datacenter for testing.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.