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I've connected two HP expander cards to a single LSI 9211-8i HBA just for testing purposes. Was able to see any and all drives connected to any of the ports on both expander cards. Never tried daisy-chaining them. Flashing the firmware (on either an HBA or expander) is not for the timid, at...

Depends on how you're using your server. With some systems, such as unRAID, most people use SSD for cache writes and then dump the cache to spinning drives overnight. Things that need fast read speeds are kept on the SSD cache. Cheers!

So it's your backplane that's the issue? I have these old SuperMicro CSE-M35T-1B 5-in-3 drive cages, and the drives in them negotiate 3Gb/s with LSI 9201-8i & HP Expander. I was pleasantly surprised when I tried them on the "new" build; I've had the cages for about 10 years.

I flashed both of my cards to latest 2.10 firmware while connected to LSI SAS9211-8i using Linux booted from USB stick. Not that difficult if you follow instructions carefully. At command prompt, type in "lsscsi -g | grep HP" (without quotes) to get firmware version.

Depending on your NAS configuration, the speed could affect thoughput. If you're running something like unRaid or other software-based NAS system, then the speed isn't an issue, especially if you also have somewhat decent SSD cache drive(s) available. For most DIY NAS users, these cards are...

Same, I just use the LSI SAS9201-8i (IT mode). Probably easier to run the installer with P410. Cheers!

Don't really need the P410 to flash the card, but it's helpful. Rather convoluted to do it in Linux, but works very well. Just have to be careful and follow directions precisely. Thanks for the heads up about new version!

Well, I think I figured the HP Expander card issue out. Set device timeout options in LSI SAS9201-8i higher than default, and all drive offline issues went away! Now to start turning each one back down one at a time, to see which one(s) actually affect the disks. For now, seems to be running...

I've always disabled the bios, because I don't boot from any disk connected to the 9201, and no need for bios to be loaded in memory. If I don't have the HP Expander card connected, just drives directly to 9201, OS sees all drives perfectly. I don't change settings when connecting the expander.

Hello All, It seems my successful preliminary evaluation of the combo Avago/LSI 9201-8i and HP Expander card was short-lived. After some time, upon restart of the system, I would randomly lose drives. This progressed until only 1 or 2 drives show up on reboot to OS. The strange thing is that I...

Excellent! Ordered one just now. I think that the card can be safely & securely mounted below the motherboard in an available slot in my case (10 available, so 3 empty below mb). If not, I should be able to find a good place for it in this case (thermaltake core wp200). Many thanks!

Does anyone know if something like this would work to simply power the HP expansion card properly (without connecting the little card via usb to a pcie slot)...

Successfully installed Avago (LSI?) 2008 chipset based controller and HP expander last night. Pulled Areca 1220 out. UnRaid rebuilt perfectly, even though ports were changed all around, including some motherboard ports also. Amazing. The expander card negotiates at sata 2 speed, 3Gbs, which is...

LSI 9201 w/ 9211 IT mode fw ver P20.00.07.00 arriving this week. As I understand it, the 9201 is the same as 9211 except for nvram chip, which supposedly isn't used in IT mode. This is according to ebay seller theartofserver's youtube video on the subject. How do I tell what firmware is on the...

Thanks for the info! I'll probably find something else then. Doesn't have to support all the fancy raid options, just JBOD for UnRaid. Any suggestions on what might work well with the HP expander card?

Thanks for the info, ordered one as soon as I saw your post. Speed isn't a concern. Spinning disks will be connected to the ports, and they can't saturate 6Gbps link anyway. Running UnRaid, so reliability is first priority. I'll check out the forum at servethehome. Thinking about connecting...

Hello All, Wow, quite the thread. Haven't hit the tip of the iceberg yet as far as reading this, but a quick question. I currently own an Areca ARC-1224 hba. Only needing more ports for UnRaid system. Can the HP Expander work with this hba, and if so, is there any advantage to connecting both...

Hello all, Not sure if this is the proper area to post this, and if not, please delete or let me know where it needs to go. I have APC XS 1000 UPS, and just wondering if it's ok to lay it on it's side while operating. Thanks!

Hardware setup like that requires duct tape to secure the heat sinks properly. Duct Tape FTW !!!

Are you pushing that Corsair 550W PSU a bit when you spin up all those drives?

I've been using 1 Promise 8-port and 3 Areca 8-port sata raid cards (each in raid6 configuration) for quite a few years, works great. A bit expensive but worth it; never lost data when a drive or 2 failed. UPS's help with those occasional power problems.

I got away from PC P&C for the second time last year. First time was several years ago when I received almost 50% dead units in a shipment of a dozen or so 475's and they gave me a hard time getting them replaced but finally did it. Switched to Antec back then. This time 4x 850 units died in...

I've been using that server case model for years. Both Antec and ServerCase (KRI) sell it (maybe others), and KRI also sells fan control boards that mount just behind and below the center 3.5" bays. Lately I've been mounting 3x5 hot-swap sata cages from supermicro in the 2 front 3-drive bays...

Another vote for non-integrated controller card. Not that I would recommend doing this every day, but I have taken a working raid card / drives combo out of an intel box and booted it up in an amd box with very few problems, other than reboots after it found new hardware. This was with either...

It will take some time to inventory the systems, as they have not been powered up for several months. They were used as small file servers and seti clients. Most (or all) of them are dual slot-1 motherboards & cpu's, probably ranging from 450 or 500mhz up to around 800mhz. I don't think any...

How many dual P3 systems ya want? I probably got at least 5 or 6, and a bunch of scsi drives and raid cards. Just taking up space in the spare room.

Early raptors were quite noisy; current drives seem to be quieter than most seagates according to some recent user posts, and my personal experience. To OP: If you're not looking to spend a lot of money and don't need the latest and greatest of the bleeding edge hardware, some very good...

PC P&C 1KW-SR ftw.

There's really not much of a performance hit in real-world apps using 2T, is there? Synthetic benchmarks are known to take a much larger hit than app benchmarks in that area, afaik.

There is performance to be gained from partitioning in certain circumstances. If you make a small partition at the beginning of a drive and put often used files on it, the drive's heads will not have to seek very far to get to the files. I've seen this called "short-stroking" the drive...

I've read some opinions on how to get max performance from the new Seagate perpendicular recording drives. Since the density per platter is higher, experimenting with different stripe and cluster sizes seems to make some difference in array speed. Don't know how much performance difference there...

I've often thought "ridiculous" would be a good term for it. OTOH, I've noticed a definite speed improvement since trying out a couple of raptor 150's striped for my os drive. Definitely a huge waste of space, but they really do have much faster overall drive performance. Of course I image the...

I used the nv raid5 on one of my Tyan S2895 systems for a while, seemed to work fine. Performance was not as high as dedicated card, but that was to be expected. Tested a drive failure, recovered the array with no problems.

I just hate the term "RAID 0". What is redundant about striping? I call it aid0.

I must have hit on a good combination when I installed it in the Asus NCT-D; performance is excellent. Was more than a bit frustrated after attempting to get either the Areca 1120 or 1220 working with that mb; finally gave up and purchased the EX8350. Fortunate that I had Tyan S2895 systems to...

Regarding where to store programs or data, it depends on how you use them. I usually make a swap file partition on the same drive as the operating system. However, I've been experimenting with other configurations, such as making a partition at the beginning of a different drive for the swap...

Have seen instances where using an optical drive as master and hdd as slave created problems, but hdd master / optical slave worked fine. Probably depends on controller & drives.

You'll get almost same performance with raid1 as with single drive. If one drive fails, data remains intact. Raid1 array recovery ease and/or success varies with controller & software type.

I've had best results with Seagate drives over the years. However, have been using Hitachi 80g sata300 drives for 6 months or so and they seem to be running quite well. Recently installed 2 WD Raptor 150's in stripe config and they have excellent performance. I make image backups of this...

Another possible issue if using dedicated raid card with consumer-type motherboards, such as the A8N-SLI: Many raid cards seem to have problems with motherboards that are not "server-type" components. I even had a supposedly server / high-end workstation board that would not work with certain...