HP SAS Expander Owner's Thread

I know the hp sas expander has an internal sff8087 port marked "to controller." But has anyone had success connecting a raid controller/hba to the external sff8088 and expanding in?
 
Thats how i have mine connected. Think of the SAS Expander like a network switch.
 
The issue with the HP Sas Expander only syncing drives at SATA150 instead of SATA300 is wierd. It appears dependant on the port you are using. For example I have the following drives;
Lmy

Drives E#2PHY#32 ->E#2PHY#35 have SATA300, but the rest are SATA150.

I'll need to move cables around and see if any of the other ports work at 3.0gbps or if you need to have the ports filled out sequentially or something stupid like that. Drives connected via slot 8C & 9C will sync at sata 3.0gbps, but the rest still don't.

How to I tell what the link speed between the expander & my areca 1680 is?
 
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This is a good question and I have seen the same thing. I will be seeing a new hp card here soon with updated 2.06 software and I will report back on the findings. I wonder if Odditory can give us a little insight on the way the card lays the drives out in the mcraid ap. I need some help on getting all drives in order.
 
Hi guys, Read through most of the thread after picking up a few of these cards. I've noticed a different part number in the few ebay auctions I looked at, are there any difference?

Also, I was planning on using a 3ware 9690SA (I have one with 8 internal ports and one with 8 external), with these, but I can't seem to get the controller past "Waiting to initialize" when the expander is connected. I did see a post about limiting the controller speed to get it to cooperate, but that didn't seem to make a difference.

Thanks in advance for the help.
 
just did some reading & searching in here... :( .... LSI 9260 not working with this expander :mad:
 
I wonder what is the difference between 468406-B21 and 487738-001?
On hp site both are used.

Thank you!

I'm reading the thread and not yet found an answer - is it possible to power the board via custom means? E.g. what pins are actually used to provide power to the board? I wish to power it inside "DAS", e.g. there won't be any motherboard, just two PSU (12V & 5V) and a lot of HDDs :)

Thank you for responses once more.
 
I think I've just been bitten by a floating reset signal or not enough psu.

The hardware is; A q6600 in a GA EP45 DQ6, 8gb of ram (mostly generic stuff), areca 1680lp(SES2 disabled, latest firmware), hp sas expander(2.02) and a hd5450 for video signal. 17x2tb hitachi deskstar 7k2000's (8x3EA in one raidset, 8x3MA in the new raidset, 1 on loose) and an 160gb g2 intel ssd. The PSU is a corsair hx620 with 3 custom power cables (1 cable power 4 sata drives).

I've just upgraded to add another 8 2tb hitachi drives, for 17 in total. Before I had a staggered spinup time of <2 seconds which caused the controller to timeout drives and then hardlock. Correcting this to 2 seconds on the staggered spinup, at least didn't hardlock the controller. Instead it looks like when the 1680 spun drives down, and then backup, it started listing some of the drives being removed then when it fails both arrays all the drives get removed and the hp sas expander is no longer listed as connected. I determined this via the out-of-band management console. A hard reboot was required to get the hp sas expander listed again, after which all the drives appeared back as normal and both raidsets & volumes where fine and not failled.

I managed to sucessfuly initialise the second raidset and have both running when I had a 2nd psu(random pos) powering the new raidset and the rest of the hardware on the existing one. I used this as a temporary setup untill I had some custom power cables to go from a 1 molex to 4 sata made up. Which drive gets dropped first don't appear linked to which power cable it is connected to.

As long as only one array is connected, the entire setup appears stable. Turning off APM lets me keep both arrays online, and as long as the drives don't sping down it is fine (wrote ~4tb to the new array without an issue).

Setting "Time To Spin Down Idle HDD" to 1 minute and letting it spin all the drives down, followed by hitting each array one after the other and waiting for them to spin-up in sequance works. Spinning both array's down and then hitting both at once reliably causes timeout errors and/or the hp sas expander to disappear.

However, it is quite frustrating to have half my fileserver's storage capacity offline or that turning off drive spindown doesn't solve the cause of this issue and causes my server to use more power.
 
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Xon said:
..when I had a 2nd psu(random pos) powering the new raidset and the rest of the hardware on the existing one. I used this as a temporary setup untill I had some custom power cables to go from a 1 molex to 4 sata made up. Which drive gets dropped first don't appear linked to which power cable it is connected to.

As long as only one array is connected, the entire setup appears stable...
Click to expand...

that in bold, says to me: not enough power.. is the q66 oc'd?
with that many hdds, i'd step up to a 850W psu :thumbup:
 
gmutale said:
that in bold, says to me: not enough power.. is the q66 oc'd?
with that many hdds, i'd step up to a 850W psu :thumbup:
Click to expand...
Waste of money. I've been running a Q6600 and 22 drives on my 610w PC P&C for years and my second chassis with 20 drives has a 400w Corsair power supply.
 
Can anyone confirm if the Intel SASUC8I supports sas dual-linking with the HP expander?

Thanks for the help.
 
Read post #1 and #2. Yes dual linking is supported on SAS2008 based HBA's, and for anyone buying into an HBA now I would *only* recommend something SAS2 based, not just for dual linking with expanders but in general.
 
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gmutale said:
that in bold, says to me: not enough power.. is the q66 oc'd?
with that many hdds, i'd step up to a 850W psu :thumbup:
Click to expand...
Nope. Running stock, and most of the time slower than stock due to powersaving features.

I'm got it running fine with two arrays with spin-down disabled. Once I get some free time I'll breakout a multimeter and look at what is coming out of each power run on the end of the chain. If it's a floating PWRGD signal it wouldnt take much of a dip on the 3.3v line to cause the sas expander to reset or at worse the psu not supplying enough power and the drives failling to start.

Part of the problem is if you have two raidset's the areca card will start spinning both up at once rather than one at a time, if you hit both array's with IO
 
So I have a question that isn't really about the SAS expander but I thought I might as well post it here anyway.

I am building a NAS out of a Norco 4220 using the SAS expander, running Raid 50 with 3 sets of 6 disks with two hot spares.

Now I want to know if I could put two NICs into this NAS, one regular 1Gbit card, connected to the switch and the rest of the network, and one 10gbE card, connected directly to another 10gbE card in my workstation? This is to avoid having to buy a 10gbE switch which is extremely expensive.

How would I go about this? If it will even work? I have absolutely no experience with 10gbE products nor building a NAS from scratch. any tips or ideas are greatly appreciated.

Thanks
 
You just run a cable directly from each 10gbit NIC and have them on a different subnet. I actually bought a couple 10gbit ethernet cards a few days ago, so I can give you some results if you wait until the end of the week.
 
Ok great, So since both the NAS and the workstation is connected to both the 1gbit network and then 10gbE between them, I put the subnet for the 1gbit network to say 255.255.255.0 and for the 10gbE 255.255.254.0

To make sure all communication between workstation and NAS goes through 10gbE I assume there is a way to map the network shares on the NAS to that specific subnet? Sorry but I have never used a NAS before :)

Please keep me updated on your 10gbE experiences.
 
Example setup:
Subnet #1 - 192.168.0.0 /24
192.168.0.1 - Gateway
192.168.0.2 - 1gbit Desktop
192.168.0.3 - 1gbit NAS

Subnet #2 - 192.168.1.0 /29
192.168.1.2 - 10gbit Desktop
192.168.1.3 - 10gbit NAS

You would then mount any network shares from the NAS under the 192.168.1.3 IP.
 
I've gone with the Intel AT copper adapters. If the ones I bought work nicely, I'll link you to some cheap ones I've found. They're PCIe x8 of course.
 
I'd be inclined to ask why you need 10gbit? What are you transferring that requires such a connection at home? The only answer I can imagine is, because I can :)
 
It seems wasteful to set up a raid 50 array using 3 sets of 6 drives and not take full advantage of the speed. I don't like waiting. If I want to copy some movies or other large files, from my 4x60gb SSD raid 0 array to the NAS, I don't like to sit around for 30 minutes waiting :) and also, because I can and it is fun to experiment.
 
I use server 2008 R2 or esx 4.1 (or soon ESX with VMDirectPath passthrough. If I were better at solaris/bsd I'd use a sas card + expander + zfs. But I know when problems occurred I'd be 10x more clueless how to fix or recover anything.

There was a thread around here with a guy who was making a web interface for zfs, it looked pretty cool.
 
Agreed odditory, though FWIW I'm interested in the continuation of that discussion, so if one of you could please post the link to where you pick it up from here, I'll follow along there. Thanks.
 
I want to thank Synergydusrtin for coming through with a flawless hp expander card with lastest firmware 2.06. I have to say this was my problem the whole time. The new card with lastest firmware solved everything. My areca 1880i is now posting perfect without the a11 pin taped, link agression now operational along with seeing all arrays including boot array off card. This card also fixed the sata speed problem with all drives. I want to also thank odditory for bringing this to life and working me through the bugs of previous version card. For other owners of this HP expander and Areca card get your ccurrent firmware first on both. I feel this will solve most of the headaches:)
 
once again, hp expander firmware 2.06 isn't a requirement for dual linking. there was something else wrong with your original card, something at the component level and undetectable. based on your experience and that of others recently it seems like some of the b-stock/refurb cards in circulation are suspect, so good to get your expander swapped if there are issues early on.

for the first 9 or 10 months after starting this thread a year ago I never really saw these kinds of issues reported nor had them with my own cards, and I've dealt with about 16 or so. not sure what's changed recently but at least people can be aware of it.

one theory is the expander chip or card's other components are damaged by excessive heat by owner #1, sent in for RMA, refurbed and passes a few quick basic tests under normal temps, then sold back in the refurb market and strange problems crop up when its running high temps again. again, pure speculation but i did have a friend that tested ethernet adapters for a large company and what I described is exactly what he witnessed with cards exposed to excessive heat - they may appear to function normally for brief periods but are "never quite the same".
 
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odditory said:
one theory is the expander chip or card's other components are damaged by excessive heat
Click to expand...

I was thinking this as well so when I bought my second and third expander (brand new direct from hp) I mounted a fan on top of the heat sink. Motherboard stand offs screw in perfectly between the 4 corners of where the heat sink fins start and stop again. I had an old video card fan I mounted right up to the stand offs. Worked great and temps went way lower. From too hot to keep your finger on to just warm. I could have tested it via IR but didn't bother. If someone wants a picture I can put the fan back on and get one posted up here. Unfortunately I couldn't get an expander to work reliably with my areca 1880i or lsi 9211-8i no matter what I did. The first expander I had was definitely a faulty one though. My 1880ix-16 is working great...so far... Probably due to my mobo or the combo of hard drives I was running. Even my new 1880ix-16 didn't like my samsung hd154ui. Taking out that one drive made all the difference. I wish I could say it has been a pleasant experience dealing with these hbas and expanders. So far this has been the worst computer hardware experience I've ever had. So rewarding to finally have something working. I don't even care about the near grand I spent on one stupid card to use in jbod!
 
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From the STH contact forum I've actually heard of a few of these HP SAS expanders not working well in non-server chassis. From what I have gleaned, I think that quiet fans and fans in the front of cases instead of a middle partition are not pushing enough air through the expansion slots. A guess, but seems like something reasonable at this point.
 
I've got some semi good news for Adaptec 5805 owners prior to reading this thread I bought a 5805 plus the HP sas expander and of course it didn't work so I had emailed adaptec back in November asking them weather or not they would be coming out with a firmware update to make it compatible and I pretty much pleaded my case saying that if it were possible it would give them an edge over the competition since there isn't a whole lot of sas expanders out there for the consumers and PMC-Sierra(the makers of the chip on the expander) bought adaptec back in august of last year so it would seem logical to at least give it a shot at coming out with a firmware update for it a few days later I got an email back saying that it will be added to the list for the engineers to work on but they gave no ETA now fast forward to this month still no firmware update for the card so I emailed them back and here's what I got

Subject
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Adaptec 5805+HP SAS Expander


Discussion Thread
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Response (Luis Maldonado) - 01/28/2011 12:13 PM
Greetings from Adaptec,

We have requested an update from Engineering on this issue. Unfortunately, there appear to be issues with developing a solution to the problem and so far no fix has been found. We are waiting to hear whether engineering thinks this will be an issue they will be able to resolve or whether, based on their current findings, they feel this problem may be considered an incompatibility that cannot be fixed. As soon as we get a definite answer, we will update you.

Thank you for contacting Adaptec Technical Support

Customer (Steven Henderson) - 01/24/2011 02:00 PM
This is in regards to a previous question I had asked back in November Reference #101106-000003
I own the adaptec 5805 raid controller and I had bought an hp sas expander so I can connect all 24 drives from my Norco rpc-4224 server chassis except the sas expander isn't compatible with this raid card back in November i was told that this issue was added to the items to be worked on by engineering and I'm just wondering if there's any ETA on it or if this expander is going to be compatible in the near future?
Thanks,
Steve

Auto-Response - 01/24/2011 02:00 PM
Thank you for using ASK Us.

So I will be keeping my fingers crossed for an update I love this card it's a great performer at a great price and I've never had any issues with it
 
Hi

I would like to contact SynergyDustin about purchasing a HP SAS expander, but can't PM him because of the ingenious "minimum 15 posts before any PMs" rule.

I don''t expect him to be reading this post, so could someone please PM me his email or something so I can contact him?

Thanks
 
Bro2, I'm pretty sure that new post rule was just implemented in the past few days. (I just got over 15 posts myself to overcome this).

I have PM'ed him for you.
 
Give them a call at 763746919 (only until 17:30 CST though, so you'll have to wait until tomorrow unless you leave a voicemail).
 
Blue Fox: I saw back in October you mentioned that you had two HP expanders running off an Areca 1880. Were these setup one off each port, or daisy-chained?


Does anyone have experience running two HP expanders daisy-chained? I'm thinking one in the intial chassis, and would like the capability of mounting a second in another chassis to use for DAS.
 
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