I bought 2 cables for a FreeNAS array of 8 hard drives in 2019. I used them with an LSI HBA and a Rosewill case. I had trouble with the hard drive connections when I initially set them up. Occasionally a drive would go offline. I assumed that his was poor contact with the hot swap bays and re-seat the drives until they came online. Recently I discovered the issue: one of the SATA connections on the Mini SAS Male SFF-8087 to 4 Female SATA cables does not reliably connect. From my /var/log/messages I get these errors:
Oct 7 23:52:42 freenas mps0: Controller reported scsi ioc terminated tgt 9 SMID 2103 loginfo 31120303 Oct 7 23:52:42 freenas (da0:mps0:0:9:0): WRITE(16). CDB: 8a 00 00 00 00 02 13 95 a8 50 00 00 00 10 00 00 Oct 7 23:52:42 freenas (da0:mps0:0:9:0): CAM status: CCB request completed with an error Oct 7 23:52:42 freenas (da0:mps0:0:9:0): Retrying command, 3 more tries remain Oct 7 23:52:43 freenas (da0:mps0:0:9:0): WRITE(16). CDB: 8a 00 00 00 00 02 13 95 a8 50 00 00 00 10 00 00 Oct 7 23:52:43 freenas (da0:mps0:0:9:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Oct 7 23:52:43 freenas (da0:mps0:0:9:0): SCSI status: Check Condition Oct 7 23:52:43 freenas (da0:mps0:0:9:0): SCSI sense: UNIT ATTENTION asc:29,0 (Power on, reset, or bus device reset occurred)
A forum online suggested that I re-seat the HBA controller, and all the cables. When I monitored the connection status in the HBA boot menu, I noticed that a specific drive bay would consistently fail to mount. I swapped the hard drive with another, but the any drive in the bay would still fail to connect. I had the idea to switch the SATA cables and the problem followed one SATA cable labelled P3. At that point I realized it was not the hard drive or the bay, but it was the mini SAS to SATA cable.
I decided to replace my Mini SAS cables and went with a different brand. No issues connecting my drives now. I may have got a bad cable, or these are low quality.