HP SAS Expander Owner's Thread

I'd already checked the website of most of those other websites claiming to be selling the HP SAS Expander. Among them most either didn't have stock, were listing the price of the expander before VAT (meaning it was cheaper to buy direct from HP) or they had no picture of the expander they were selling.

I'd have been much happier getting it for £216 :D But at least I have one ordered now and fingers crossed it may turn up on Friday. If anybody needs their expander flashing once I have mine all connected and working I would be more than happy to.
 
Degsy said:
I'd already checked the website of most of those other websites claiming to be selling the HP SAS Expander. Among them most either didn't have stock, were listing the price of the expander before VAT (meaning it was cheaper to buy direct from HP) or they had no picture of the expander they were selling.

I'd have been much happier getting it for £216 :D But at least I have one ordered now and fingers crossed it may turn up on Friday. If anybody needs their expander flashing once I have mine all connected and working I would be more than happy to.
Click to expand...

£216 for a yellow PCB expander would have been a waste of good money, don't look back now that you've taken the plunge @ least you have got it of a good source.

I might take you up on that offer when I get an expander and it'll be in need of flashing, your offer is greatly appreciated.

Post back and let us know how you're getting on when you get it installed and working.
 
Howdy,

it would be nice if anyone using the HP Expander with a Supermicro A0C-SASLP-MV8 could tell if all connected HDDs S.M.A.R.T. information get passed through correctly under Windows (XP or 7), meaning if monitoring applications such as HD Tune show the SMART data for each connected drive (or only the first eight).
 
Just got a beta firmware update from Areca for the SES2 issue. Seems to fix the issue and I've tested it on three different 1680 series cards - was able to set SES2 to "Enabled" and drives are now seen. Before I post a link to the file I have to relay one concern to Areca: that instead of seeing 32 ports on the HP expander as before the update, only 24 are seen. Probably not an issue for most people running a 20 or 24 bay chassis and connecting up to 24 drives, but one of my systems has 2 HP expanders loaded with 32 drives each, so for now, more testing is needed.

BEFORE the update (SES2 = Disabled)

BEFORE.jpg


AFTER the update (SES2 = Enabled)

AFTER.jpg
 
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Odditorry: The issue you are talking about is not 'really' an issue. If you look closely, you will notice that when SES2 is disabled, the drives are labeled PHY#xx(y:yy) and after you enabled SES2 they are labeled Slot#xx(y:yy). What happens when you enable SES2 is that the RAID controller queries the expander and only shows that actual active ports. Before all ports were shown no matter if they were used and/or active. Once you plug a drive into a port that is not shown, the controller should recognize this and change the screen accordingly. You should be able to test this by removing a drive, updating the screen and the slot should no longer be visible. Once you put the drive back in and refresh the screen, the drive should be back in the list!
 
treadstone said:
Odditorry: The issue you are talking about is not 'really' an issue. If you look closely, you will notice that when SES2 is disabled, the drives are labeled PHY#xx(y:yy) and after you enabled SES2 they are labeled Slot#xx(y:yy). What happens when you enable SES2 is that the RAID controller queries the expander and only shows that actual active ports. Before all ports were shown no matter if they were used and/or active. Once you plug a drive into a port that is not shown, the controller should recognize this and change the screen accordingly. You should be able to test this by removing a drive, updating the screen and the slot should no longer be visible. Once you put the drive back in and refresh the screen, the drive should be back in the list!
Click to expand...

Not sure that's accurate. Example I have nothing plugged into slots 21-24 yet they're showing up as empty slots when SES2 is enabled. Maybe they enable in blocks of 8, I'll do some more testing. For starters I'll plug 32 drives into the expander and see what it shows. Hopefully you're right!

UPDATE: Areca seems to think that it's the expander's firmware that's the limiting factor, as it only supports 24 ports *in SES2 mode only*. So, for now it seems like if you want to connect more than 24 drives, SES2 will have to remain disabled. I'll still do some testing to confirm.
 
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Blue Fox said:
Good to hear there is some progress. :D
Click to expand...

They also said they've got the HP expander and the ARC-1880 working at SAS-2/6G without issues and have made some adjustments in the firmware based on being able to get hands-on with the card. So that's good news.
 
odditory said:
They also said they've got the HP expander and the ARC-1880 working at SAS-2/6G without issues and have made some adjustments in the firmware based on being able to get hands-on with the card. So that's good news.
Click to expand...
Lovely. Looks like I'll be buying an 1880 as soon as they're available then.
 
No kidding, props to Areca. This is night and day good customer service compared to my complete inability to get an intelligible reply on anything but the most very basis issues from HighPoint "support." Nice to see them so actively engaged on this.
 
Well, I guess the saying 'You get what you pay for' fits. HighPoint controllers may be cheaper compared to Areca cards, but Areca's customer service is by far more responsive and actually provides you with meaningful and useful replies!

I can honestly say that to date Areca has provided me with the best customer support/care especially considering the 12 hour time difference between them and me!
 
@odditory: The ports that show up but are blank when SES2 is enabled might be active (as in the PHYs are turned on) even though there is nothing plugged into them. So when the RAID controller querries the expander card, the card will respond with information about 'active' ports. The RAID controller will only display the 'active' ports and hide 'inactive' or 'disabled' ports. When SES2 is disabled, the RAID controller queries the expander card for the total 'remaining' ports on the expander (I said remaining because it automatically removes the links used between the RAID controller and expander card).

It's been a while sine I looked through the SAS protocol standard documentation. If memory serves me right, there are a LOT of functions/features that the RAID controller and expander exchange when SES2 is supported. For example, among those are information if the ports are rearranged (as in the case of the HP SAS expander). So if Areca implements this correctly, the RAID controller should automatically reorder the drives. Currently my drives are ordered right to left as in 4, 3, 2 and 1 per backplane. I hope they fixed that as well :)
 
I understand the query sequence, my question is simply whether SES2 mode is going to place some ports on the HP off-limits to harddisk connections. Kevin@Areca seems to think the HP expander is capped at 24 ports in SES2 mode, but it doesn't sound like they've tested it. Later today I'll test 32 drives plugged into the expander with SES2 engaged and see what happens -- will drives connected to Ports 8 and 9 on the expander disappear? That's the big question.
 
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Thanks for the firmware file. I'm in the same boat, I have my 48 drives distributed between two HP expander cards, so I only have 24 drives per expander too.

Unfortunately, I dislocated my shoulder last Saturday and my server has been sitting in my garage waiting to be moved into my basement since the 2nd of April :(

Can't do anything right now. Have to see if a couple of friends can help me out this weekend and move this beast for me.
 
Are there any other fixes implemented in the beta firmware? Or just SES2 functionality?
 
HP Sas Expander works fine (FW v1.0) with PERC6/E.

Is there anyway (or any need?) to upgrade the firmware of the expander?
 
Tried the beta firmware on my 1680ix-12. SES2 enabled works fine now and it looks like the power saving features seem to be stable now.

BTW, I see the same phenomenon regarding 24 ports with SES2 enabled compared to 32 ports with SES2 disabled.
 
Found some info here that might be of interest to users with P400 controllers.
http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1271765522642+28353475&threadId=1206652
:)
<snip>
Well. HP has replaced my controller, now NCQ is supported. Here are the facts I found. Hope this is helpful to anyone who want to attach NCQ capable SATA drives with SA-P400.

1. SA-P400 Hardware. It must be a controller that made after the HP NCQ announcement, which is around Sept 2007. My new P400 has a hardware rev D. Previous one is B. NCQ-capable and non NCQ-capable P400 are physically different.

2. Backplane. It is said that the backplane must support this configuration. I believe most HP SAS backplane for 3.5in HDDs will be fine. Although I have backplane for 2.5in in SAS drives, I don't have a 2.5in SATA II drive for testing.

3. Hard disk drive. It is not neccessarily to be a HP HDD. However it has to be a NCQ-capable HDD. NCQ is not a new stuff, (but new to HP SA controllers). Almost all SATA II drives today support NCQ. Since I've sent my 500 HDDs to the reseller for replacement, I put in 6 320G Seagate 7200.10 HDDs. It works very well. It proved that new SA-P400 supports all NCQ drives. Nothing to do with the HDD firmware. It is all about the physical circuit.

4. Firmware of SA-P400. Must be 4.06 or later.

5. SA-P400 driver. I don't recall the exact version number, but one of the fixes/enhancements made to the driver, ADC, and ACU last year around June/July 2007 mentioned the addition of NCQ status.

6. Identify. To identify if the controller supports NCQ, check ADU->Controller->Identification->NCQ: (Supported / Not Supported). To identify if a HDD supports NCQ, check ADU->Physical Drive Identification->NCQ is supported, NCQ is enabled. You can also find information in System Management Homepage, it will show NCQ Support: No Controller Support/No Drive Support/Enabled

7. HP provides replacement of SA-P400 per customer basis.

8. SATA vs SAS and Why NCQ?
a) SATA HDDs are far cheaper than SAS HDDs with much larger capacities.
b) SAS HDDs have higher rpm than SATA HDDs, and have much higher throughput than HDDs. However, the throughput can be compensated using more drives in a raid array.
c) SAS HDDs are more reliable. Well, they are. But recent SATA drives are reliable enough with RAID 5/6.
d) Concurrency. SAS drives has better concurrency than SATA drives. TCQ (queue depth 64) is implemented in SAS drives to support simultaneous multi-target access. However with NCQ (queue depth 32) offering pretty much the same functionality, the difference is getting closer.

NCQ is very important if you use SATA drives in a centralised storage enviornment, such as IP SAN.

When multiple instances access the array at the same, the performance difference between NCQ and non NCQ drives is obvious.

9. We are using HP gears and SAS drives in our production environment to support some performance critical applications in our IP SAN and virtual infrastructure. We use SATA drives for development and testing environment, and for storage of massive production data.
<snip>
 
Odditory - any news from Areca regarding the 1300-series (notably the 1300ix) and the HP expander?
 
I'm not sure what news you were waiting for. The ARC-1300-4x works, but I'm not sure about the 1300ix's due to the onboard expander on that card that the signal would route through. It *should* work but I'm not 100%. You can try emailing support (at) areca.com.tw and they're usually pretty good about responding. Now that they have an HP expander in their inventory, they might be able to test for you.
 
odditory said:
I'm not sure what news you were waiting for. The ARC-1300-4x works, but I'm not sure about the 1300ix's due to the onboard expander on that card that the signal would route through. It *should* work but I'm not 100%. You can try emailing support (at) areca.com.tw and they're usually pretty good about responding. Now that they have an HP expander in their inventory, they might be able to test for you.
Click to expand...


Thanks odditory for your information. In regards to the ARC-1300-4x i can see it is supported is there anything i need to keep in mind that the initial post does not? I had a look thru the thread and doesn't seem to see anything. Initially i want to run one with the expander in the norco but possibly buy a second set later to two run from another norco case. I don't need a raid controller as i plan to use open solaris or another nix based OS.
 
I can confirm the HP Expander works with the SuperMicro AOC-USAS-L8i (LSI 1068E Controller)


Working great sofar, working on some performance testing right now with it.
 
pipingfiend said:
Thanks odditory for your information. In regards to the ARC-1300-4x i can see it is supported is there anything i need to keep in mind that the initial post does not? I had a look thru the thread and doesn't seem to see anything. Initially i want to run one with the expander in the norco but possibly buy a second set later to two run from another norco case. I don't need a raid controller as i plan to use open solaris or another nix based OS.
Click to expand...

you can keep in mind that at boot-time it will only show the first 8-drives (i.e. if you press the boot-time BIOS key to enter the card's bios menu). initially that was a concern but Areca stated it was to save on Int13 resources and is trivial, and once the Areca windows driver loads, all 32 drives attached to the HP expander are seen in Windows Disk Management. I verified this.

I haven't tested with linux drivers but I imagine it's the same. So basically you're only limited to 8 drives if let's say you boot into DOS with a Win98 disk - kind of a non-issue.
 
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Tau said:
I can confirm the HP Expander works with the SuperMicro AOC-USAS-L8i (LSI 1068E Controller)


Working great sofar, working on some performance testing right now with it.
Click to expand...

That is good to hear, I expected it would I just didnt have the money to buy it without making sure.
 
I am having some weird issues under Opensolaris with the expander speed wise... so YMMV

Will be doing more comprehensive testing over the next couple days with it though.
 
Tau said:
I am having some weird issues under Opensolaris with the expander speed wise... so YMMV

Will be doing more comprehensive testing over the next couple days with it though.
Click to expand...

Well the Expander is OS independent. What RAID card are you using?
 
SuperMicro AOC-USAS-L8i - when I had both ports from the controller connected to the expander the speeds were terribly slow... unhooked the second link... doubled the speeds... Have only had the box going for a few hours now will be doing some more indepth testing with it over the next week or so.
 
odditory said:
I'm not sure what news you were waiting for. The ARC-1300-4x works, but I'm not sure about the 1300ix's due to the onboard expander on that card that the signal would route through. It *should* work but I'm not 100%. You can try emailing support (at) areca.com.tw and they're usually pretty good about responding. Now that they have an HP expander in their inventory, they might be able to test for you.
Click to expand...

It is the onboard expander in the ix I want to know about - if they can bring out a new firmware for this card too it would be a great way to put together a huge, expandable JBOD system across several Norcos - 1300ix in the main box controlling the local drives, then daisy-chaining extra Norcos with HP expanders for expansion.

I'll email Areca and see if they are looking to update the 1300ix as well as the 1600ix-series cards.
 
I just got the SAS expander and AOC-SASLP-MV8 combination running in WHS. WHS asked for a driver tor the HP SAS EXPANDER on the first boot up. I ignored it. All drives are appearing in WHS, but there is a yellow ? in device manager. Is this normal? Cause for concern? My understanding from the forum is that the card doesn't need a driver. Thanks
 
Tau said:
SuperMicro AOC-USAS-L8i - when I had both ports from the controller connected to the expander the speeds were terribly slow... unhooked the second link... doubled the speeds... Have only had the box going for a few hours now will be doing some more indepth testing with it over the next week or so.
Click to expand...

Try disconnecting the primary link...perhaps speeds will quadruple. ;)
 
Well, I added a drive to the pool, the expander seems to function properly. However, every time I boot into WHS I get a found new hardware message asking me to install driver for < HP HP SAS expander SCSI enclosure device>

When WHS is shut down, I get a BSOD with <DRIVER IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL>

I tried disabling the expander in device manager, which still gave BSOD on shut down, and then uninstalled it - which also gave a BSOD on shut down. However, the hard drive attached to it still shows up even when it is disabled or uninstalled.

This card has firmware 2.02 for what it's worth. Any ideas on wher to go from here, other than laying out more cash for an areca?
 
bellaireroad said:
It has the latest, no issues with it ;)
Click to expand...

I think what danman meant was that the AOC-SASLP-MV8 needs a driver and NOT the HP SAS expander.

What was the exact message you got during the WHS installation?

Did it actually mention the HP SAS expander?
 
bellaireroad said:
Well, I added a drive to the pool, the expander seems to function properly. However, every time I boot into WHS I get a found new hardware message asking me to install driver for < HP HP SAS expander SCSI enclosure device>

When WHS is shut down, I get a BSOD with <DRIVER IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL>

I tried disabling the expander in device manager, which still gave BSOD on shut down, and then uninstalled it - which also gave a BSOD on shut down. However, the hard drive attached to it still shows up even when it is disabled or uninstalled.

This card has firmware 2.02 for what it's worth. Any ideas on wher to go from here, other than laying out more cash for an areca?
Click to expand...

What happens when you remove the card from your system and boot into WHS?

Do you still get an unrecognized device icon in the device manager?
 
treadstone said:
I think what danman meant was that the AOC-SASLP-MV8 needs a driver and NOT the HP SAS expander.

What was the exact message you got during the WHS installation?

Did it actually mention the HP SAS expander?
Click to expand...

Yes, it specifically asks for " HP HP SAS EXPANDER SCSI ENCLOSURE DEVICE" exact words
 
treadstone said:
What happens when you remove the card from your system and boot into WHS?

Do you still get an unrecognized device icon in the device manager?
Click to expand...

I've tried several scenarios



1) with no connection between cards - no message to install drivers - NO BSOD on shutdown - HP SAS device in Device Manager with yellow ?

2) with cards connected without hard drives - message to install drivers for "HP HP SAS EXPANDER SCSI ENCLOSURE DEVICE" - no BSOD on shutdown - HP SAS device in Device Manager with yellow ?

3) with cards connected, with HDD- message to install drivers for "HP HP SAS EXPANDER SCSI ENCLOSURE DEVICE" - BSOD on shutdown - HP SAS device in Device Manager with yellow ? . Drives show up in device manager, and can be added to pool.


AOC-SASLP-MV8 has latest drivers from SM FTP site. AOC-SASLP-MV8 shows in device manager has having drivers installed and functioning.
 
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