HP SAS Expander Owner's Thread

Do you recommend Hitachi instead of WD? I have always had good experiences using WD black drives.
I think the 1880 series are a little expensive. I really only need a raid card with one sff-8088 connector to reach my goals. Also, as I understand it, the HP SAS Expander card only supports 600MB/s when using SAS2 disc drives? Or maybe that is not the case for the interconnect between the raid card and the expander card? I will probably use a SAS2 raid card anyway so great, 2400MB/s with a single sff-8088 cable. I am actually not using the network for large file transfers. The raid card goes into my workstation that is then connected with the sff-8088 cable to the HP SAS Expander card in the file server. I will obviously use the server as a NAS as well but only for streaming media etc. For that I only 1gbit ethernet.

What would the performance be (ball park) with 2 sets of 10 drives in raid 50? I think I will actually use 4 sets of 5 drives each in 50 ((5-5-5-5)-0) to up the performance as I don't think I will even be close to 1200MB/s with just 2 sets of 10 drives each. I don't have any experience with raid 5 on this scale so I really don't know.
 
@hyperion007:

From what I understand you are trying to do is setup a storage array by using a Norco 4220 with 20 WD black drives connected via a HP SAS expander to your workstation using a SFF-8088 cable. What I don't quite understand is your comment about the Norco also being a file server connected to your network via a 1Gb/s network. Are you trying to use the the same enclosure and drives for both? As in having a motherboard inside the Norco as a file server with the necessary HBA or RAID controller hooked up to the HP SAS expander as well as having the workstation connect to the same drives via the SFF-8088 cable???

If you want to run a RAID setup with the WD black drives, you will have to look into WDIDLE and WDTLER !

What is your intended use for this file server/storage array?
 
Do you recommend Hitachi instead of WD? I have always had good experiences using WD black drives.
I think the 1880 series are a little expensive. I really only need a raid card with one sff-8088 connector to reach my goals. Also, as I understand it, the HP SAS Expander card only supports 600MB/s when using SAS2 disc drives?

Just to give you an idea... 950MB/s+ with the Supermicro's X8SI6-F's onboard controller plus a HP SAS Expander and only one 4 port link between the motherboard and the HP SAS Expander.

Either way, single GigE you don't need read/ write more than 125MB/s.
 
Just to give you an idea... 950MB/s+ with the Supermicro's X8SI6-F's onboard controller plus a HP SAS Expander and only one 4 port link between the motherboard and the HP SAS Expander.

Either way, single GigE you don't need read/ write more than 125MB/s.
Nice write up. I was curious about the onboard performance. Seems I got my answer. :)
 
@treadstone

You are right, I must have had a brain fart yesterday :) I mixed things up in my head because I had contemplated having the raid card in the file server and then a quad nic and link aggregation as the main interface OR the raid card in the workstation with the sff-8088 cable as the interface. Sorry for that :)

I was looking at getting 10gbit/s fiber network instead of sff-8088 as the interface between server and workstation but that seemed to be very expensive. Maybe I'm not finding the right priced stuff. That would be the best actually because then I could turn the file server off when I don't need it, saving LOTS of money on the electricity bill :)

@pjkenned, Thanks, 950MB/s is not bad at all. it will match my 4xSSD array quite nicely :)
 
Nice write up. I was curious about the onboard performance. Seems I got my answer. :)

Thanks. I appreciate the kind words. BTW the LSI 9211-8i ATTO results I would not be able to tell the difference between the two except for the fact that I write and save descriptions. It is nice to see solid onboard performance.
 
I have a brand new ARC-1880i, SAS expander with v2.06 firmware, and several Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB drives (ST31500341AS).

The problem is that the "Current SATA Mode" is downshifting to "SATA150+NCQ(Depth32)" instead of "Supported SATA Mode" of "SATA300+NCQ(Depth32)".

I sent an email to Areca tech support and the only suggestion was to “place a jumper on the drive” but with this HD model a jumper would only force it to 150…

Anyone else have the 1880 or any Areca RAID card working at 300mbps with the expander? Did you need to do any tricks to make it work?

Thanks
 
My 1880i is working fine for me with both of my HP SAS expanders at full speed. Those drives aren't compatible with the RAID card however. You can expect problems if you continue to use them.
 
I have a brand new ARC-1880i, SAS expander with v2.06 firmware, and several Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB drives (ST31500341AS).

The problem is that the "Current SATA Mode" is downshifting to "SATA150+NCQ(Depth32)" instead of "Supported SATA Mode" of "SATA300+NCQ(Depth32)".

I sent an email to Areca tech support and the only suggestion was to “place a jumper on the drive” but with this HD model a jumper would only force it to 150…

Anyone else have the 1880 or any Areca RAID card working at 300mbps with the expander? Did you need to do any tricks to make it work?

Thanks

Tell me how to test and I will tell you. I have the same setup - 1880i - sas expander - 9x seagate 7200.11 1.5tb. I am just using the 1880i in jbod though.
 
@dirtrider I believe he's referring to the incompatibility of those drives with the integrated expander on Areca 1680ix and Adaptec 5 series cards. There was a common misconception that the incompatibility was with the RoC when in fact it was the expander on the models of those cards with greater than 8 ports. In fact those drives work beautifully on any non "ix" model 1680 card, and *any* model of 1880 including the 1880ix due to the new LSI expander on those.

I've had 8 of those same drives in RAID6 for a long time. First an Areca 1680 + HP Expander and now an 1880i + HP Expander, never a single hiccup or dropout or even bad sector and the array gets abused daily as temp space. Mine connect just fine at SATA300, as you can see in the screengrab below - all 8 of my ST1500's look like this.

Q: What firmware rev are your Seagates (mine are CC1H), and do you have any other drives connected besides the Seagates? Also what firmware rev on the HP expander? Mine is at 2.02, maybe there's an issue with 2.06 and these drives.

seagate.jpg
 
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So it sounds like these drives should work with the 1880i if I am reading this correctly. I did some testing and plugged a drive directly into the raid card and it negotiated correctly at 300, it just seems through the expander its downshifting to 150 for some reason.

I currently have nine of these Seagate drives, eight are at CC1H (brand new) and one is at CC1J (about a year or so old).

I just got the Areca card yesterday and made sure all of the firmware was up to date before I even added any drives.

BTW, how are you guys pasting in those HTML table screen shots in teh message editor?
 
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@dirtrider - what firmware version is your expander at? It should tell you on the "RAID Set Hierarchy" page.
 
Tried downgrading the expander to 2.02 but still stuck on 150 - Argh!

Update - I tried going all the way back to 1.52 and still no joy - Double Argh! Maybe the FW on the Areca card is somehow different?
 
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Hi,

Probably a noob question, but will this card work with the Supermicro X7SPA L/H/HF ATOM motherboard. So i can build this in a Norco RPC-4224, and use it as a NAS.
 
^ Yeah. I'm sure the HP Expander is compatible with that motherboard in terms of working correctly in that PCIe slot, but with only one PCIe slot you'd have no room for a SAS host card. "And therein lies the dilemma."
 
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^ Yeah. I'm sure the HP Expander is compatible with that motherboard in terms of working correctly in that PCIe slot, but with only one PCIe slot you'd have no room for a SAS host card. "And therein lies the dilemma."

Thanks for answering.

You always need a host card with this Expander card? Learned something today.
 
Been doing some more testing with my 1880i. For whatever reason, my 1680i didn't like it when I daisy-chained expanders, so I had to hook them up to separate ports on the card, but the 1880i doesn't seem to mind and it appears to be working well.
 
Been doing some more testing with my 1880i. For whatever reason, my 1680i didn't like it when I daisy-chained expanders, so I had to hook them up to separate ports on the card, but the 1880i doesn't seem to mind and it appears to be working well.

Yeah daisy chaining appears to work with 1880 <-> expander <-> expander, but I've been having some issues which may or may not have to do with the daisy chaining, like I started a 20TB file copy going overnight between an array on one expander and an array on the chained expander, and about 4TB into the copy (a couple hours later) drives just started dropping out, then the entire expander dropped, then of course the other expander dropped since it was daisy chained.

When I rebooted, volume didn't come back on source array because raid sigs were corrupt, and long story short I've been in recovery mode ever since. The whole point of the overnight copy was re-establishing my backup copy after having to temporarily delete the old one. Typical murphy's law.

Anyway I've also suspected a flaky motherboard and possibly a flaky 1880i card (I have two), so tread lightly on the daisy chaining until I do some more stress testing to determine if there's in fact an issue with chaining expanders off the 1880, or it was the fault of other components. I've had it happen twice in fact.
 
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After testing, I went back to having them connected separately. No benefit to daisy chaining them for me with only two expanders.
 
Well daisy chaining is pretty handy if you have two server cases and the second one is a JBOD chassis with no motherboard, because then you can take advantage of the SFF-8088 ports to do the chaining, and that's why I'd like to get the issue resolved. In fact in one of my two RPC-4224's I did exactly that - used the Orbit Micro power board and Dremel'd off the bottomside card slots so it would fit on the ATX standoffs, and loaded it up with drives. That wasn't the chassis that failed on me though.
 
I have the same setup. I bought a SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 bracket from nitrobass the last time I saw him, so I've been using that.
 
^ Ultimately it's cleaner that way since the second expander has one less hop to the host card. But you already knew that :)
 
@dirtrider - what firmware version is your expander at? It should tell you on the "RAID Set Hierarchy" page.

Enclosure#2 : HP HP SAS EXP Card 2.06(F)

I have 9 of those seagate 1.5tb drives and 1 samsung 1.5tb drive connected through the expander. Samsung is also showing 150 (SAMSUNG HD154UI).

Any ideas who only 150mbps per above chart anyone?
 
Any jumpers set on the Seagate 1.5TB drive? Its been a while but I thought I remember they ship defaulted to SATA I. I realize you said its negotiating at SATA-II when connected to Areca card directly, but check it anyway.

What about SFF-8087 cables? Have you tried different ones between Areca 1880i and HP Expander? It's unlikely to be a cabling issue but I have to ask, I have seen strange issues with certain cables, that went away by switching to another one. FWIW all my internal interconnects in all my systems are now standardized on 18" Norco SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 cables, not because I think its a superior cable, but because I wanted uniformity. Also if you're dual linking between 1880i and Expander, make sure both cables are same length. I remember reading an HP doc that called for that. Again, that's unlikely to be the cause of your SATA-I negotiation, but an FYI.

If I didn't have 8 of those drives myself, all working fine at SATA-II, I would've assumed its an issue with the drive by now.
 
I just tried unplugging all drives so I can eliminate possibilities. I wanted to bypass my 5:3 enclosure and try with only one type of drive. So I just connected up one single drive of the seagate 7200.11 1.5tb and it is sata 150. I tried the same test with a single 2tb WD green, single 2tb WD Black, and the single Samsung 1.5tb and all drives only ever show up as 150. Only thing I don't have are different cables. I am dual linked from the sas expander to the 1880i with the areca included cables. I am using lsi brand cables for sff-8087 to 4x sata. I tried a different cable just to make sure it wasn't one of them. I would have expected something to work at 300???
 
Yeah something should've worked at SATA-II. During your testing just single-link from the Areca to the expander. Make sure you're using the topmost SFF-8087 connector on the 1880i, and plug that into port #8 on the expander. If that still doesn't work then something may be up with the expander, why don't you PM me where you bought it from.
 
I have been playing around with this today. With just a single drive if I go straight into the 1880 (either port) it negotiates to 300. Any combination of cables, ports, etc through the SAS Expander and it downshifts to 150. I had extra / different brand cables and lengths & got the same result. I even went two revs down on the Expander bios and sill the same.

It doesn’t make sense why some people are getting 300 with the same config and others like us are stuck on 150. I am beginning to think its not the Expander because besides the firmware version there isn’t much to it. Maybe some variable with the 1880 like a hardware revision or one of the firmware levels?

UPDATE - Latest response from Areca Tech Support below. They are saying that the Expander is responsible for the drive speeds but that doesn’t explain why some of us with the same Expander, HD, and FW level are seeing different things.
--------------------------------------
Please find out if HP has a newer firmware to fix it.

HDD working speed is controlled by the expander chip.
It can not set by the RAID controller.
Customers need to request the expander firmware to fix it.

It means that the HP expander reported to controller the ST31500341AS 1.5 TB HDD working mode 1.5G not 3G on it.



Best Regards,
 
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I'm not too surprised to hear you think it is the sas expander because I was thinking that too. I had some issues with it not booting properly since I put that in this past week and when initially trying it the thing wouldn't boot with any drives connected to port #2. I disconnected all from the hp sas expander and just took 1 drive and connected straight to the areca 1880i and it was fine at 300. Then I tried 8 of them straight to the 1880i and they were all at 300 just like they should be. No matter what combo I try (including your single link with top port on 1880i to port 8 on expander) I can't even get a single drive to work at 300 with the expander. Tried all combos of drives and cords. It would timeout at the firmware loading screen half the time too. I tend to agree that I have a bad expander. It works sometimes with some ports but never at 300. I got it from SynergyDustin and lots of people seem happy buying through him so I'll try to get it exchanged. Sound like the right course of action at this point?

Before I do that can you both verify controller info?
Enclosure#1 : ARECA SAS RAID AdapterV1.0
Controller Name ARC-1880
Firmware Version V1.48 2010-08-19
BOOT ROM Version V1.48 2010-08-19
PL Firmware Version 7.0.0.0
 
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I am skeptical that anything is physically wrong / broken with the Expander. Since at least two of us are seeing the same issue and others are not there must be another variable in play here that we haven’t identified yet. Like I said my suspicion is something to do with the Areca firmware levels (why so many anyway?).

Here is the info for my 1880. @odditory – can you please post your vitals so we can compare what a "working config" looks like? I am already seeing some differences.

-------------------------------------------------------------
Controller Name ARC-1880
Firmware Version V1.48 2010-09-02
BOOT ROM Version V1.48 2010-09-06
PL Firmware Version 5.0.18.0
Serial Number Y039CACOAR200082
Main Processor 800MHz PPC440
CPU ICache Size 32KBytes
CPU DCache Size 32KBytes/Write Back
System Memory 512MB/800MHz/ECC
-------------------------------------------------------------
 
I am skeptical that anything is physically wrong / broken with the Expander.

Yeah I didn't see you post before I posted mine since I hadn't refreshed the thread. Now that I see our configs and how much different they are I'm hoping we find it being something else. Looking forward to seeing odditory's info. However, I'm still a little concerned at the seeming intermittent functionality of my card.
 
Areca support is correct. The link speed is negotiated between each end point meaning the HP SAS expander's processor negotiates the link speed with each HDD's processor.

It works similar to an Ethernet switch in the sense that you can plug to components together end to end (with the appropriate cable) and they will negotiate the highest possible speed. If you then add an Ethernet switch in between the two end points, each end point has to negotiate it's highest speed capability with the Ethernet switch.

The Areca controller is not involved in negotiating the link speed between each expander port and the corresponding HDD.
 
Yeah daisy chaining appears to work with 1880 <-> expander <-> expander, but I've been having some issues which may or may not have to do with the daisy chaining, like I started a 20TB file copy going overnight between an array on one expander and an array on the chained expander, and about 4TB into the copy (a couple hours later) drives just started dropping out, then the entire expander dropped, then of course the other expander dropped since it was daisy chained.

When I rebooted, volume didn't come back on source array because raid sigs were corrupt, and long story short I've been in recovery mode ever since. The whole point of the overnight copy was re-establishing my backup copy after having to temporarily delete the old one. Typical murphy's law.

Anyway I've also suspected a flaky motherboard and possibly a flaky 1880i card (I have two), so tread lightly on the daisy chaining until I do some more stress testing to determine if there's in fact an issue with chaining expanders off the 1880, or it was the fault of other components. I've had it happen twice in fact.

Of course I could be way off base, but this sounds like it could be a heat issue to me...

BTW, I've got 7200.11 1.5TB drives running on my expander via my LSI 1068E controller. Though I'm having a hard time determining if they're running at 3.0Gbps or 1.5 Gbps. In fact I seem to have lost my CC1H 7200.11 at the moment. Will investigate further...

Can anybody suggest a method for determining link speed from expander to drive using an LSI 1068E HBA and WHS?
 
Of course I could be way off base, but this sounds like it could be a heat issue to me...

That crossed my mind too but hard to confirm after the fact. I do have all my expanders outfitted with a fan mounted on the heatsink which makes a big diff, and I know their temp ranges relative to ambient even with all 24 drives going full bore for hours and heating up the expander chip. Overnight, ambient only drops. I'm going to continue to try duplicating the failure. What I do know is I've been running the same config for 9 months, and only when I added an 1880i + daisy chaining two expanders did I see this behavior.

As for your 1068E, it's going to be hard to determine linkspeed unless the BIOS menu for the card has an option -- I know the SAS2008 based cards show linkspeed in the bios.
 
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The LSI 1068E BIOS shows the link speed between the HBA and the expander (all 4 channels show 3.0Gbps), but not between the expander and the drives.
 
I have not had such good luck with the Highpoint 4320. I connected it in different configurations, port 1 and 2 of the controller to ports 8 and 9 of the expanders (and all variations) and it does not recognize my drives. Any thoughts appreciated.

I troubleshot the expander in several different motherboards and still cannot get it to work. The top LED is solid. I decided to take it to work and checked it againse an HP DL360 G6 and an HP DL380 G6, both with Smart Array P410 controllers with 512MB of RAM and I have the same results.

Is there anything else to test?

Can anyone else confirm that the Highpoint 4320 does indeed work with the expander? It says on the front page that it is confirmed working but jmmcc (who I have just quoted) was unable to get it to work.

I'm considering the purchase of the Highpoint 4320 + HP SAS Expander myself and I'd love some more yay or nay's on the compatibility before I pull the trigger.

Thanks.
 
So that is making me really want to see if I can get it working on the Supermicro X8ST3-F's onboard LSI 1068E controller. It didn't work upon first startup, but seems to be worth another shot.

Did you ever get this working? And if so, would it also work to dual link it?
 
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