HP SAS Expander Owner's Thread

OP UPDATE:

- Added LSI SAS 9211-4i, 8i and 16i non-raid SAS-2, PCIe 2.0 HBA cards to the OP as verified working. These controllers do also pass SMART stats, drive temps, etc. to the host O/S. I realize someone reported success with an 8i card + HP expander back in April, but I wanted to do my own testing and see where any pitfalls or bottlenecks might be. Good cards with a lot of bandwidth, the 9211-8i is probably my favorite non-raid HBA for use with the HP expander now in terms of price/performance and future-proof for 6G drives. I picked up a couple at Provantage..

- Added Areca ARC-1880i raid card as "verified working". Still doing stress testing since I only just got this card, so far results are good.

- Downgraded the Areca ARC-1300-4x non-raid HBA to "works with expander, but not recommended" since it does not pass SMART stats or drive temps to host O/S, and starts bottlenecking with more than 3 drives worth of simultaneous read I/O. At this point its better to wait for the Areca ARC-1320 series - hopefully it'll have a beefier chip and multi-disk I/O will be improved. Not to mention Areca hasn't updated the driver on the ARC-1300 since early '09.
 
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VenomousDesigns said:
Just wanted to confirm before I went ahead with my Norco 4224 buy.

I will need 6xNorco 0.5M Mini-SAS(SFF-8087) to 4xSATA Discrete Cable which will connect from my HP SAS Expander > Backplates?

and then a 1xNorco 0.5M Mini-SAS(SFF-8087) to Mini-SAS(SFF-8087) Multilane SAS Cable which will connect from my SAS Controller (AOC-USAS2-L8e) > HP SAS Expander?

Thats everything correct?
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Nope, your backplane cables should be the same as the cable from the SAS controller to the HP SAS expander. The 4224 backplanes have SFF-8087 connectors.
 
@VenomousDesigns: there's a dedicated Norco thread if you have cabling and build questions. Please help keep this thread somewhat on track with HP expander discussion.
 
odditory said:
@VenomousDesigns: there's a dedicated Norco thread if you have cabling and build questions. Please help keep this thread somewhat on track with HP expander discussion.
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Apologies Odditory, won't happen again.

@OT: Any confirmation about the AOC-USAS2-L8e compatibility as of yet?
 
I would be very surprised if that card did not work since it uses the SAS2008 chip, which I've tested pretty thoroughly and found no problems (LSI 8211-8i). In general no matter what LSI HBA I've tried, it works. Keep in mind even though its a SAS-2 card you aren't going to realize double throughput to the expander with SATA drives since I don't believe it will multiplex (double bandwidth) with the expander without SAS-1 or SAS-2 drives (and even then its questionable). In other words performance will be about the same as a SAS-1 card so don't get too hung up on a SAS-2 card.

The card is still going to max out at 960MB/s with 8 drives direct-attached just like a SAS-1 HBA, and about 800MB/s through the expander. Also keep in mind it's a UIO card, not PCI-express, so either your SM motherboard needs a UIO slot or you'll be dealing with having to mod it like houkouonchi did to make it fit in a PCI-e slot here: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1520533
 
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odditory said:
I would be very surprised if that card did not work since it uses the SAS2008 chip. I've tested the SAS2004 chip pretty thoroughly with no problems and in general no matter what LSI HBA i've tried it works. Keep in mind even though its a SAS-2 card you aren't going to realize double throughput to the expander with SATA drives since I don't believe it will multiplex (double bandwidth) with the expander without SAS-1 or SAS-2 drives (and even then its questionable).

The card is still going to max out at 960MB/s with 8 drives direct-attached just like a SAS-1 HBA, and about 800MB/s through the expander. Also keep in mind it's a UIO card, not PCI-express, so either your SM motherboard needs a UIO slot or you'll be dealing with having to mod it like houkouonchi did to make it fit in a PCI-e slot here: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1520533
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From what I can gather from a quick google around - the UIO means that it is still a PCI-E card but is the opposite way around. Hmmm, that could prove alittle annoying - however by the looks of the Intel S3420GPLX;

INTEL-S3420GPLX.jpg


I might be able to get away with removing the bracket (just simply unscrewing it correct?) no?
 
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FYI: From now on updates to the OP including the HCL (hardware compatibility list) will be reflected in the CHANGE LOG, post #2. That means whenever I test a new card or firmware or can confirm someone else's findings, it will be noted there instead of scattered throughout this thread.

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1035158557&postcount=2

In other news I've been doing a lot of testing and experimentation with the HP expander and different combinations of SAS-2 RAID and HBA cards, and will have some very good news to report soon.

Lastly I'm curious if anyone with an Adaptec 5805 or 5085 would be willing to re-test the HP expander with the latest Adaptec firmware. The last time I checked the expander with an Adaptec 5805 it still required expander firmware v1.00, due an Adaptec firmware bug.
 
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odditory said:
FYI: From now on updates to the OP including the HCL (hardware compatibility list) will be reflected in the CHANGE LOG, post #2. That means whenever I test a new card or firmware or can confirm someone else's findings, it will be noted there instead of scattered throughout this thread.

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1035158557&postcount=2

In other news I've been doing a lot of testing and experimentation with the HP expander and different combinations of SAS-2 RAID and HBA cards, and will have some very good news to report soon.

Lastly I'm curious if anyone with an Adaptec 5805 or 5085 would be willing to re-test the HP expander with the latest Adaptec firmware. The last time I checked the expander with an Adaptec 5805 it still required expander firmware v1.00, due an Adaptec firmware bug.
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I'm happy to try it again. PM me and we can arrange the details...
 
odditory said:
Keep in mind even though its a SAS-2 card you aren't going to realize double throughput to the expander with SATA drives since I don't believe it will multiplex (double bandwidth) with the expander without SAS-1 or SAS-2 drives (and even then its questionable). In other words performance will be about the same as a SAS-1 card so don't get too hung up on a SAS-2 card.
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Could you please explain mulitplex? Is it because of the expander?
edit: found this http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1036249632&postcount=3

Hmm that's it. I'm buying SAS 1 card lol.
 
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Yes there seems to be a lot of confusion over multiplexing (TDM or Time Division Multiplexing) - an optional component of the SAS-2 spec that vendors may or may not choose to implement - and how it applies to SATA-II (3G) and SAS (3G) drives. My hunch is that TDM only supports SAS (3G) drives. When pressed about TDM, some SAS-2 equipment vendors (LSI, Supermicro) have used the excuse that TDM doesn't support SATA drives because they're HALF duplex, and TDM requires FULL duplex drives (SAS). Part of me thinks they're just guessing.

To recap for anyone that hasn't been following this, TDM is the ability to mux SAS 3G into SAS-2 6G uplinks, thereby doubling bandwidth and leveraging "legacy SAS 3G disks" with SAS-2 RAID/HBA's and expanders. At least that's the marketing bulletpoint. However with SATA-II drives, even though the link between SAS-2 HBA and SAS-2 Expander is 6G per port, Eschertias in packetboy's thread thinks that every other DWORD is being filled with a filler block, for an effective rate of 3G per port. That's a good possibility.

For me, two questions are on the table: has HP (PMC) enabled TDM in the HP SAS Expander's firmware, and does it require SAS 3G drives. I've been A/B testing SAS drives and SATA-II drives on an HP Expander + SAS-2 RAID adapter (Areca 1880i), and should know the answer soon.
 
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Very interesting indeed. But isn't the STP-protocol limited to 800 MiB/seconds in the first place? Or has this limit been lifted by the SAS 2 STP?

BTW: excellent recap!
 
Now for some good news, it looks like I'll have to retract my earlier statement "don't get too hung up on a SAS-2 card." After some testing in fact there's a very big benefit even for SATA drives in using certain SAS-2 RAID/HBA's with the HP expander, TDM issues aside.

Can you say... LINK AGGREGATION? (Oprah voice). The HP expander supports it, now its just a matter of testing which SAS-2 RAID and HBA's also support it, besides the Areca 1880 series which I can confirm.

Left side: Single SFF-8087 uplink from port #8 on HP expander to Areca 1880i.
Right side: Dual SFF-8087 uplinks from port #8 and #9 on HP expander to Areca 1880i.

odditory2.jpg
 
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Just for us dummies. Link aggregation = running 2 physical cables between the HBA and expander? I thought SAS nor sas 2 supported this.

edit: after reading more closely. Two cables ^^. Nice.
 
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nitrobass24 said:
Does link AG work on the 1680?
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Not in my tests. If you remember back when this thread first started, dual linking was one of the first things that was tested with an Areca 1680, and back then as well as today it doesn't appear to support it. Nor do any of the SAS-1 HBA cards from Supermicro and LSI that I've tested. Maybe there are other SAS-1 cards out there that support it, but I'm not aware of any.

It's still unclear to me whether link aggregation is part of the SAS-2 spec set or already existed in SAS-1. I know multipath (MPIO) has existed since SAS-1 for leveraging dual port SAS drives in failover/load balancing topologies but I'm not sure that aggregating two uplinks from expander to host card is necessarily a function of MPIO. Regardless, vendors also need to actually implement features from the SAS/SAS2 spec sets in their products for them to actually work. Example: TDM. Works on SAS-2 expander from company A, but not the SAS-2 expander from company B - even though both expanders employ the same expander chip - so an issue of differing firmware.

Since there's not exactly an independent review process or governing board or even requirement for a storage vendor to follow a particular spec to the letter, they're free to "interpret" SAS/SAS-2 to fit their particular marketing/political agenda. Thus incompatibilities arise, and for our purposes, all we can do is test one by one.

This week I'll be testing some more SAS-2 cards for dual linking support with the HP expander: LSI 9211-8i (HBA), LSI 9260-8i (RAID).
 
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odditory said:
Since there's not exactly an independent review process or governing board or even requirement for a storage vendor to follow a particular spec to the letter, they're free to "interpret" a spec like SAS/SAS-2 to fit their particular marketing/political agenda. Thus incompatibilities arise, and for our purposes, all we can do is test one by one.

This week I'll be testing some more SAS-2 cards for dual linking support with the HP expander: LSI 9211-8i (HBA), LSI 9260-8i (RAID).
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According to the STOS002 presentation at IDF, there were a lot of incompatibilities with the ways that people implemented the interconnect in SAS 1.0 which were a focus for SAS 2.0 and SAS 2.1. I wouldn't be surprised if this case was one of them. Things are apparently better in 2.0 and even better in 2.1 about specifying the exact ways in which things should work so that interop will be better going forward. Apparently this was a big concern of end users with SAS 1.0 who had a lot of interop issues, so it became a focus with 2/2.1. 2.1 brings even more interop work including OOB management of external cables, more cable types (active copper and optical) and new connectors (x8 internal and external with forward compat to 12 GT/s).
 
Howdy,

are there any information available yet if the Expander will also support drives >2 TiB with 512 Byte sectors?

On a sidenote, I would be glad if someone running an AOC-SASLP-MV8 with the Expander under Windows could tell me if the SMART information for all attached drives get passed through, so that monitoring applications show them.
 
Would anyone be prepared to buy me one, update it, and ship it to me?
It appears to be hard to find here:mad:
 
Hi!

Phew... I just read through all the pages over the course of a week, and have a SAS HP Expander enroute, for the nice price of $200.

I have a offer of a free Highpoint 2680, which according to manuals supports 128 Devices through SAS Expanders. Of course, I wonder, will it work with the HP expander ?

Thanks! and awesome thread!
 
Responded. Unfortunately we can't ship overseas for these, but folks have been kind enough to purchase and then ship to abroad members of the forums.

Great group of industrious folks here.
 
Question about the SAS expander. I am planning on getting an Areca 1880i 8 port card, with aspirations of getting a SAS expander and filling it in the future. So say I have an 8 drive raid 6 set up on the Areca, can I just move the 8 drives over to the SAS expander, plug the expander into the Areca and it will just fire back up as if nothing had changed?

Also from reading the updated first post, I could dual link the raid card to the expander to get more bandwidth?

If so this is gonna be sweet....
 
Looking to purchase a HP SAS expander from SynergyDustin, but he can only ship / bill to a USA address and I am in the UK, would any kind member willing to help me out please, I'll pay abit extra to cover all postage / time costs. Please let me know via pm. Thank you.
 
I've been some to people overseas. PM me if you want me to do it for you. Doesn't matter where you are. Have plenty of references if you'd like them. :)
 
thanx for the reply guys, only problem is with purchasing it from the UK is that, I dont know what firmware the card will ship with, and as dustin will update the firmware to the latest one 2.06 so it should be all good, otherwise the only other method to update the firmware for the card is with one of the hp cards raid cards attached, such as the 410 / 410. Hence why I would like to purchase the card from him.
 
i wouldn't get too hung up on the firmware rev as long as its v1.52, the minor tweaks since then are insignificant for home users with desktop class drives.
 
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LSI 9211-8i SAS-2.0 HBA (SAS2008 chip) added to dual linking compatibility list. The animation alternates between single and dual SFF-8087 uplinks, and as you can see the scaling efficiency is pretty compelling in terms of sequential transfers. AFAIC this is the high watermark for HBA's right now for anyone with more than 8 drives running JBOD or software raid, I've seen them go for $150 NIB on ebay.

Test setup: LSI 9211-8i (IT firmware) + HP SAS Expander 2.02
System: Norco RPC-4224, Supermicro MBD-X8SIL-O MB, Xeon X3440 CPU, 8GB MEM (KVR1333D3E9SK2/4G)

16 x Hitachi 2TB in Windows Raid0, NTFS 64k clusters
o624NS.gif


20 x Hitachi 2TB in Windows Raid0, NTFS 64k clusters
gVCo8M.gif
 
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Hello fellow owners. I'm a recent member of the hp sas expander owners club. Would anyone be able to recommend a motherboard to use that will run the expander fine without CPU ram? I tried using some old boards i have without CPU and ram to no avail.

Thanks in advance.

Plums.
 
alleyezonme said:
thanx for the reply guys, only problem is with purchasing it from the UK is that, I dont know what firmware the card will ship with, and as dustin will update the firmware to the latest one 2.06 so it should be all good, otherwise the only other method to update the firmware for the card is with one of the hp cards raid cards attached, such as the 410 / 410. Hence why I would like to purchase the card from him.
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I've bought a couple from Span (http://www.span.com/product_info.php?products_id=31549), version 2.whatever. Works fine as long as your card can support the later version number.
 
plumsicle said:
Hello fellow owners. I'm a recent member of the hp sas expander owners club. Would anyone be able to recommend a motherboard to use that will run the expander fine without CPU ram? I tried using some old boards i have without CPU and ram to no avail.

Thanks in advance.

Plums.
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I am using a spare Supermicro C7X58 desktop board that I had lying around. So far it seems to work with no cpu / ram although the X58 chipset seems to draw a lot of power even at idle.

This is an overkill solution, I had this board for a desktop but the board is no good from that perspective ... too buggy.
 
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