HP SAS Expander Owner's Thread

@Jerkson

I'm surprised you could see the expander at all. I was under the impression that expanders were like Ethernet switches - 100% transparent (except to an HP card, obviously). Obviously with expanders that isn't the case.
 
They cannot be transparent as they must enumerate themselves to the OS to be within the PCI-E spec. They are driverless though and the OS has no control over the expander, only the controller card does.

Your ethernet switch isnt exactly transparent either ;)
 
Jerkson said:
Ports 8 & 9. If I only wanted to do one, I would do #9 but either one should work. They both have a white square around them right on the PCB itself and the white square is labeled "To Controller" whereas the other pairs of ports are labelled "To Drives" (or something to that effect)

Are your drives connected to the sas expander using SFF-8087 to SATA breakout cables or are you connecting the SAS expander to a backplane using full SAS SFF-8087 cables? Also, when your controller boots what FW version is on your HP SAS expander?
Click to expand...

I have tried 2 different breakout cables and 4 different SAS SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 cables which connect to my backplane. Both give the same results.

My HP SAS is FW version 2.06. My Adaptec card had an older firmware and I tried updating to the latest. I also tried setting my hdds to 1.5gbps.
 
rdmustang1 said:
I have tried 2 different breakout cables and 4 different SAS SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 cables which connect to my backplane. Both give the same results.

My HP SAS is FW version 2.06. My Adaptec card had an older firmware and I tried updating to the latest. I also tried setting my hdds to 1.5gbps.
Click to expand...

Not that this is your issue but I sure hope you actually read through Adaptec's release notes. Sometimes they do scary things with their firmware and the only mention of it is in those release notes. I got burned once.

What backplane are you running it to? What adaptec controller? 8087 and 8088 cables have different pin counts (36 & 26 respectively) 8088 is an external cable and 8087 is internal.

When hooking up your backplanes, begin populating bays attached to the backplane wired up to the SAS port #2.
 
Jerkson said:
Not that this is your issue but I sure hope you actually read through Adaptec's release notes. Sometimes they do scary things with their firmware and the only mention of it is in those release notes. I got burned once.

What backplane are you running it to? What adaptec controller? 8087 and 8088 cables have different pin counts (36 & 26 respectively) 8088 is an external cable and 8087 is internal.

When hooking up your backplanes, begin populating bays attached to the backplane wired up to the SAS port #2.
Click to expand...

I read through the release notes and everything seemed pretty standard. My backplane is part of a chasis (Acmemicro RMC5E2-QI-XPSM). I'm using an Adaptec 3085 connected via SFF-8088 cable to the external port of the HP SAS expander. I mispoke before; I'm using SFF-8087 to SFF-8470 cables to connect the expander to my backplane. I have also tried breakout cables from the expander directly to hard drives.
 
I'm having a problem where my SAS expander is appearing, however, none of the disks connected to it are showing up. I have the following configuration:

(2) Supermicro AOC-USAS-L8i cards, connected to 15 drives
LSI SAS3801E card flashed to IT mode
(2) HP SAS Expanders, in separate cases (Supermicro SC-933), connected to the 1068E. These are powered by a PCMIG card.

I have 5 drives connected to one of the SAS expanders, however, none of them are showing up!

I have attached the output of camcontrol below.

Does anyone have any suggestions on why this might be happening? Rescanning scbus2 doesn't make the drives show up either.

foghornleghorn# camcontrol devlist
<ATA ST31000528AS CC38> at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (da8,pass0)
<ATA Hitachi HDS72101 A39C> at scbus0 target 1 lun 0 (da9,pass1)
<ATA SAMSUNG HD103SJ 00E4> at scbus0 target 2 lun 0 (da10,pass2)
<ATA SAMSUNG HD103SJ 00E4> at scbus0 target 3 lun 0 (da11,pass3)
<ATA Hitachi HDS72101 A39C> at scbus0 target 4 lun 0 (da12,pass4)
<ATA SAMSUNG HD103SI 1118> at scbus0 target 5 lun 0 (da13,pass5)
<ATA SAMSUNG HD103SI 1118> at scbus0 target 6 lun 0 (da14,pass6)
<ATA Hitachi HDS5C302 A580> at scbus1 target 0 lun 0 (da0,pass7)
<ATA Hitachi HDS5C302 A580> at scbus1 target 1 lun 0 (da1,pass8)
<ATA Hitachi HDS5C302 A580> at scbus1 target 2 lun 0 (da2,pass9)
<ATA Hitachi HDS5C302 A580> at scbus1 target 3 lun 0 (da3,pass10)
<ATA Hitachi HDS5C302 A580> at scbus1 target 4 lun 0 (da4,pass11)
<ATA SAMSUNG HD103SI 1118> at scbus1 target 5 lun 0 (da5,pass12)
<ATA SAMSUNG HD103SI 1118> at scbus1 target 6 lun 0 (da6,pass13)
<ATA SAMSUNG HD103SI 1118> at scbus1 target 7 lun 0 (da7,pass14)
<HP HP SAS EXP Card 2.06> at scbus2 target 80 lun 0 (pass15)
 
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From further googling, it looks like that the LSI SAS3801E card won't work over the 8088 ports connected to the expander. Expander shows up, but drives don't.

Can anybody recommend a reasonably priced HBA with external 8088 ports that will work connected to the expanders on their external ports?
 
I'm planning to buy an expander - just to add more storage to my server (well, what's called server...) :D

Does anyone of you know, if the Dell Perc 5i oder HP P400 will work with the HP-Card? (I haven't read the whole thread so far)
I'd prefer to use the Perc as it is already installed in my box and the arrays are filled with data, but if there's no other way I could use the P400 I currently use for my SAS-drives.
 
Jerkson said:
They cannot be transparent as they must enumerate themselves to the OS to be within the PCI-E spec. They are driverless though and the OS has no control over the expander, only the controller card does.

Your ethernet switch isnt exactly transparent either ;)
Click to expand...

By transparent, I mean that the expander itself would not be visible to the RAID card, and the card would see the drives as if they were connected locally.

Additionally, this is on the first page of this thread:

The card needs an x4 PCIe slot on a motherboard and draws 11 watts of power. The card doesn't require software drivers, it is invisible to the operating system and motherboard.
Click to expand...

I was under the impression that it used the PCIe slot only for power. So is it meant to be invisible to the system or not?
 
What RAID6 capable card would everyone recommend to purchase if you already have an HP SAS expander on firmware 2.06? I was looking at the 3ware 9690 and the Areca 1680 but both have people giving horrible reports on this thread. The Areca 1880 looks ok but it's super expensive.
 
The Areca 1880i is really the way to go if you want high performance. The 1680i has no problems either (it's just the 1680ix line that does). If you want an 1880i, I have one for sale for less than newegg's price. Look for my thread in the FS section if that interests you.
 
Bookmage said:
has anyone tested the HP SAS expander on the newer generation of dell sas cards? specifically the PERC H700/H800 or the 6Gb/s SAS HBA? I'm thinking Dell 1u server w/ 6Gbps SAS HBA for a cheap head node to a norco 4224 w/the expander...
anything from here? http://www.dell.com/content/topics/...topics/en/us/raid_controller?c=us&l=en&cs=555

I can't think of why it shouldn't work other than it's dell and hp... :-p
Click to expand...

From my reading, even though Dell has removed the requirement for "Dell Branded" drives, the PERC H800 will not support SATA drives, at least from their documentation, and the H700 will not support more than 16 drives connected. Please correct me if I'm wrong! (I'd gladly be corrected, I'd love to be able to use one of those two cards).
 
JensS said:
I'm planning to buy an expander - just to add more storage to my server (well, what's called server...) :D

Does anyone of you know, if the Dell Perc 5i oder HP P400 will work with the HP-Card? (I haven't read the whole thread so far)
I'd prefer to use the Perc as it is already installed in my box and the arrays are filled with data, but if there's no other way I could use the P400 I currently use for my SAS-drives.
Click to expand...

The only PERC cards that I was able to get to work with the HP SAS Expander are the /E cards. I'm currently running a pair of PERC 6/E cards to the expanders, and then looping to a couple SuperMicro SAS Expanders.

The PERC 6/i cards were unable to post, they complained about the expander (even without drives connected) saying that they do not support enclosures.
 
It could have been so easy... So I'll see, if the P400 works (I hope a friend could test that for me if he buys an expander) or if the next thing on my wish-list is a Perc 6/e.
 
JensS said:
It could have been so easy... So I'll see, if the P400 works (I hope a friend could test that for me if he buys an expander) or if the next thing on my wish-list is a Perc 6/e.
Click to expand...

The PERC 6/E is not bad. But there is quite a bit of silliness with it. No drive number to physical drive alignment, bios does not see drive numbers, and seems to clone the information of the first drive it sees to all (a group of 1TB and 2TB drives show up all as 1TB, so just configure it in windows, so much easier), is unable to flash the drive indicators on the drives, to help you locate the drives.

Performance requires you keep both the expander and the card cool. I've been able to pull ~600MB/s through the controller during reads, writes seem to hover around ~150MB/s That is on RAID 6 arrays.
I've used both 1 and 2TB Hitachi drives, I don't know if it would see a 3TB drive or know what to do with it.

Also, you'll need cabling to put it all together. I forget which, but the PERC complains ("invalid SAS topology") when I connect it up 'backwards' (either via the external port, or the internal controller port, I forget, they are both external ports on the case it's currently in)
 
Yup, the Percs are not perfect controllers - I know that... My 5/i gave me some headache when I used some drives in JBOD-mode, some strange errors while reading files. With the Seagate-drives running in 2 RAID5s everything seems fine.
Configuring the arrays from Windows would not be a problem, as a separate sys-drive is used.

With my 5/i and 5 Seagate 5900.12 I get 330MB/s avg read and 250MB/s avg write (tested with HDTune, 8MB block size), real world was not possible so far, I got no source fast enough... But some Savvios should do that :D
 
JensS said:
Yup, the Percs are not perfect controllers - I know that... My 5/i gave me some headache when I used some drives in JBOD-mode, some strange errors while reading files. With the Seagate-drives running in 2 RAID5s everything seems fine.
Configuring the arrays from Windows would not be a problem, as a separate sys-drive is used.

With my 5/i and 5 Seagate 5900.12 I get 330MB/s avg read and 250MB/s avg write (tested with HDTune, 8MB block size), real world was not possible so far, I got no source fast enough... But some Savvios should do that :D
Click to expand...

Yeah. Wish there were better options in the price range.
HDTune says ~250MB/s per 5 drive array.
 
@parityboy: Created a RAID0 consisting of just one drive without (!) initializiation iirc.
Also iirc: This works only from software, not from controller-BIOS. (As always - do not try this with drives containing data...)

Quite a strange solution, but somehow it worked.
 
Come to think of it, I've got a scratch drive setup the same way. Not quite a true JBOD, but yeah, each drive is a raid 0 array, with only itself, mine were all done through the software interface. Sounds about normal for some of the RAID cards I've worked with.

YMMV if you're running something other than Windows, and a simple config.
 
I'm having problems getting my drives to show up that are attached to either of my expanders.

I'm using an LSI 1068E card, connected to the external port of the HP Expander. I've also tried hooking up using the internal ports to my AOC-USAS-L8i cards, and to a new 9200-8E card. The 1068e/USAS cards are updated to latest IT firmware.

In all circumstances, the expander shows up, however I'm unable to get any drives to show up. I've bypassed my backplanes by connecting drives directly to the expander with separate power, but I still don't get any of my drives to show up.

Can anyone make any recommendation? Is there an older firmware version that I need to use on the 1068E based cards to make this work? The expander is running firmware 2.06.
 
I don't see where it says the H800 doesn't support SATA disks and I can add dell SATA disks to an H800 when specing out a new server, ie R510 w/H800 and a dozen 1TB SATA drives...

On the main page, it does say the H800 supports 192 disks while the H700 supports 16, and looking through the manual for the H700/H800 only shows the virtual disks it supports. It does say at the top that it supports Dell Certified SAS and SATA and SSD drives... The H200/SAS HBA does say non certified drives will work, but not be supported and just show an error message at bootup...

I ordered a Dell SAS 6Gbps HBA and some cables from ebay and we'll see if it works with the HP SAS Expander I have... I'll stick this in my new dell server and see if it works...
If it does, maybe the H800 will work also... Ebay has them at an "affordable" price...


I wonder if the Norco DS-24E Expander works with the HP SAS Expander as well...
 
If anyone needs a tested and confirmed working HP SAS Expander v2.06, see here. Have too many of them now (5 total) since I've been experimenting with running 3 x IBM M1015 cards on one of my systems together with FlexRAID 2.0.

MeKb5.jpg
 
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@odditory: Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you can flash the M1015 cards with LSI IT firmware, correct?!?

I assume that when you configure the M1015 as a JBOD adapter, that the M1015 wraps every disc into a separate RAID array (1 disc per array)?

That's how the Areca set it up, but I have a problem with the Areca in combination with the HP SAS expanders during bootup of the server and I need to find a different solution, so I am looking for a controller to replace the Areca with, preferably a SAS2008 based controller with two SFF-8087 ports. All it needs is JBOD capability. I don't need RAID since I am using FlexRAID 2.0. Also HDD power management would be great (not sure if the LSI IT firmware actually supports HDD power management???).
 
@treadstone: i've covered all those questions HERE which is where I'm slowly moving all my content and updates since [H] has no apparent active administration interested in procuring and organizing this forum's content, stickies, etc.
 
is there a lot of difference between firmware v2.02 vs 2.06? Im building my raid right now(areca 1880i)...got 6 more Hitachi 5K3000 coming in this week =D

Edit: I'll check that out site odditory..thanks
 
iceboi714 said:
is there a lot of difference between firmware v2.02 vs 2.06? Im building my raid right now(areca 1880i)...got 6 more Hitachi 5K3000 coming in this week =D

Edit: I'll check that out site odditory..thanks
Click to expand...

I signed up too..

btw, hows the Hitachi 7K3000's with this expander & with areca 1880?
I recently saw the price for the 5yr warranty ultrastars - much lower than expected! :D ;)
 
@iceboi714: HP SAS expander firmware v2.06 release note:

Notes:

Deliverable Name:
Firmware CD Supplemental Update - HP SAS Expander Card

Release Version and/or Date:
2.06

Last Recommended or Critical Version:
2.04

Previous Version of Firmware:
2.04

Firmware Dependency:
A minimum FW version 3.30 is required on your HP Smart Array controller when updating to 2.06 FW on your HP SAS Expander Card.

Enhancements/New Features:
None

Problems Fixed:
  • Fixed an issue where HP 6G SAS hard drives would fail to spin up when configured as spare hard drives.
  • Fixed an issue where certain SATA hard drives would fail after an HP SAS Expander Card reset.
Known Issues:
None

Hope this helps...
 
I am currently dual linking on the expander with the 1880i using port 8 and 9. But when i check individual drives connected (5K3000 ) it shows supported SATA mode as SATA600 but shows the current SATA mode as SATA300. Am I missing something?

I don't think speed matters much, it is just a since i could I should kind of thing. =D
 
At this point its looking like HP expander will only negotiate 3G for SATA-III drives, 6G for SAS-2. Remember this is a SAS expander that HP asked PMC to design primarily for HP's enterprise SAS drives, so this isn't surprising. I wouldn't hold my breath on a firmware update for this issue but who knows.
 
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Bookmage said:
I don't see where it says the H800 doesn't support SATA disks and I can add dell SATA disks to an H800 when specing out a new server, ie R510 w/H800 and a dozen 1TB SATA drives...
Click to expand...

If you check out the table on Page 6 of The PERC technical guidebook it says that the H700 supports SAS and SATA drives, but the H800 supports SAS only. I've also seen that mentioned in a couple of other places too.

I've got a call in with our Dell storage guy, since I'm looking to spec up a couple of servers at work with a mix of SAS and SATA, and that's a deal killer for me.


G
 
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