HP SAS Expander

[mike938]

Hello everyone,
In my search for a SAS expander I've found that HP now makes a SAS expander card. While they list it as only working with HP products, it doesn't really make sense to me that that would actually be the case. I realize it would be unsupported, but does anyone have any experience with these or know if they will work with non HP raid controllers (Such as the 3ware 9690SA)

Thanks,
Mike

[jtg1993]

Do you have a link to the HP sas expander?

[mike938]

Sure.
http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/arraycontrollers/sas-expander/index.html

Sold from a lot of places. Actually purchased one a few hours ago, hoping to receive it Friday.If this works I guess we'll have an alternate to the Chenbro ones.

[jtg1993]

Sweet, hopefully it works with normal cards and not just hp. One problem I see with it is there is no molex so it needs a board to power it which is pretty stupid. How much did the card cost you?

[mike938]

it runs about $330 or so. And yea...the no molex connector is terrible. means I need to waste a PCI-E slot instead of a PCI or PCI-X for the card ;/

[AreEss]

According to what I've seen this is NOT a standalone card and MUST be used with the indicated controllers. It is NOT a full SAS controller, and relies on the logic and processor of the SmartArray controllers to function.

[mike938]

I didn't think it was a full SAS controller. It should just be an expander. I'd be using it with a 3ware SAS card. I'm just hoping it isn't firmware locked or anything to HP controllers. It connects in the same way as the chenbro SAS expanders (4x lane SFF8087 cable)

[jtg1993]

Man that sucks.

[mike938]

I'm planning on using a 3ware 9690SA-4I and if I ever need more storage I'd sell it and get a 9690-4I4E and a UEK13601 (assuming they ever come into existence again)

[AreEss]

I didn't think it was a full SAS controller. It should just be an expander. I'd be using it with a 3ware SAS card. I'm just hoping it isn't firmware locked or anything to HP controllers. It connects in the same way as the chenbro SAS expanders (4x lane SFF8087 cable)

That's not how it works. A SAS expander does not include complete logic, ever. That's why they come as backplanes and similar. This shifts the logic into the housing, making it controller neutral. There is no such thing as a PCIe expander that is not controller dependent.

[mike938]

Well, I got the expander I had ordered. Looking closely it seems like none of the PCI-E pins are connected to anything except maybe 2. I'm assuming they are for power, going to look at a PCI-E pin out later.
But for the good news: it worked just fine with my 9690SA-4I4E SAS controller. And the external port for tape worked fine when connected to my external UEK13601.
Performance was I believe about the same with the HP expander in between the controller and the chenbro expander. Had upgraded firmware at the same time so it was a bit better than before so I'm not sure what the HP expander did in that regard. Going to retest without it in a bit.

Edit: No noticeable performance decrease when using the HP SAS expander. Maybe 1-2MB/s or so

Does anyone know if any adapter to be able to power a PCI-E card from the power supply without a motherboard? I could've sworn I'd seen one posted somewhere very recently

[jtg1993]

Thats great that it works, if you can find an adapter like the one in this picture that will probably work if you notch out the back of the slot on the adapter. But then it might not fit in a pci slot bracket on the back of a case unless you trim the pci-e slot off the adapter.
http://www.sangoma.com/images/products/power_adapter.jpg

[simplesam]

sas2 has more new features than I thought. According pmc-sierra sas 2.0 expanders support zoning. This feature sounds great.

mike938 - Did you get a cli or any other software to manage the expander?

[simplesam]

My link didn't make it through.

http://www.pmc-sierra.com/sas6g/security.php

[AreEss]

Well, I got the expander I had ordered. Looking closely it seems like none of the PCI-E pins are connected to anything except maybe 2. I'm assuming they are for power, going to look at a PCI-E pin out later.

Would have to be power and ground.

But for the good news: it worked just fine with my 9690SA-4I4E SAS controller. And the external port for tape worked fine when connected to my external UEK13601.
Performance was I believe about the same with the HP expander in between the controller and the chenbro expander. Had upgraded firmware at the same time so it was a bit better than before so I'm not sure what the HP expander did in that regard. Going to retest without it in a bit.

That's interesting. I'm wondering how it's connecting logically then, if it's attaching to a logical SAS port and multiplexing. I'll have to do some digging, clearly, because it really should not be working.

Does anyone know if any adapter to be able to power a PCI-E card from the power supply without a motherboard? I could've sworn I'd seen one posted somewhere very recently

There are a couple ways to do it. It's just voltage. If you got a PCIe slot and wired power to it, that'd do the trick. Certainly I don't recommend it, but it would work. The problem is that you'll need to do some cheating - the cards displayed have components on them to drop voltage to PCIe 3.3V. You have to have a fixed voltage card; one that can change power state between 1.65V and 3.3V will get burned literally. You have to have a clean feed as well; PCIe cards do not have any significant voltage smoothing on them. That's a function of the motherboard physical. Dirty voltage can result in the card throwing SERR or PERR, which will cause it to fault and cease operating. (The cards pictured use an array of microcapacitors to smooth out the voltage.)

[simplesam]

According to this msn article (http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/article.aspx?Feed=BW&Date=20090331&ID=9742632&Symbol=US:PMCS), the hp sas expander is based on the next gen, pmc-sierra, PM8005 (http://www.pmc-sierra.com/products/details/pm8005/) sas-2 chip.

While the chip supports an ethernet management port, there is no ethernet port on the HP card.

From the PMC site:
The PM8005 SXP 36x6GSec device is a 36-port SAS expander that features 6G/3G multiplexing, SAS 2.0 zoning, self-configuration, table-to-table routing, an Ethernet port, and an integrated MIPS processor for SES and enclosure management support.

Applications for the SXP 36x6GSec include SAS/SATA JBODs and RBODs, high-density SAS HBAs, blade server disk interconnects, SAS switches and HDD expansion for enterprise servers.