HP SAS Expander Owner's Thread

So I'm having issues with multiple drives failing or disappearing. I'm not sure what the issues are as there are multiple components to suspect. I have a 12 drive RAID6 configuration and its not uncommon that 4 or 8 of the drives will disappear or fail. They are not always the same drives.

My configuration:
- LSI SAS 9261-8i
- HP SAS Expansion
- 12 x 2TB - WD-WMC-WD20EFRX-68A (RED Label Drives)
- Norco 4224 - CASE..(Failed drives are not specific to a particular backplane either)

After purchasing the HD, I read that the RED label HD were mainly for NAS units, I saw that WD recommended to not exceed 5 drives in a NAS configuration. Before spending $1600 dollars on replacement drives, I was hoping to some input on where to start. What do you folks think the issue is, SAS Expander (It is plenty cool, no heat issues). Raid Controller, which seems good after wiping out the configuration. It will run for a a couple days then slowly drop disk. SAS Expander? It seems to recognize the drives if you unplug them and plug them back in after failure or missing? I wonder if the RED label have some sleep or offline status if no activity, therefore the controller thinks it disappeared?

Thanks for your input, just looking for directions?
 
Well, since that setup isn't stable at the moment anyway you should consider removing the expander and check what happens with the controller only and eight drives.

Just for clarification, the expander doesn't have any heat issues but is that the case with the controller as well?
 
I have a question for anyone here using LSI 9260 series cards.

A few pages back I mentioned how the Expander and my 9260-4i are working fine with the Hitachi 4TB disks. It has been several months now and that setup is still working great and in-fact I have three more disks (1x 320GB Seagate, 2x 320GB Western Digital) also connected to the expander as a sort of test array that I'm just doing random things to like expansions, mitigations etc

Sometimes when I boot my system up either a cold start from no power or a reboot the LSI controller during the cards post phase correctly identifies the HP SAS Expander and my six disks across my two arrays. It says there is no problem at all, everything is great.

But when I get to Windows about 50% of the time the arrays will not be present in Windows Explorer and actually when I load up LSI's MegaRAID Storage Manager it shows that there is an issue for me to look at, that issue is always it telling me my disks are "unconfigured bad" and it shows me no Arrays are present. Now this sounds like a bad problem but if I simply select the disks, set them to "unconfigured good" and then select "scan foreign configuration" it reads the array information from the disks and instantly the arrays become accessible in Windows Explorer and everything is fine. The disks and my arrays never disappear randomly during actual operation only after the OS has booted up are they sometimes missing.

So my question is, why sometimes when I boot to windows (again about 50% of the time) are my arrays not being detected and mounted automatically? And is there a way to solve it? I've googled this problem for hours over the past few weeks and I just can't find a solution, it's more annoying than destructive but it's niggling at me.

I'm using Windows Server 2008 R2 with all the latest updates. I also have two HighPoint 2320 RAID cards in the system and their arrays show up every boot no problem. I'm using an Asus P6T6 Motherboard. Any help is greatly appreciated!
 
Vicey said:
I'm using Windows Server 2008 R2 with all the latest updates. I also have two HighPoint 2320 RAID cards in the system and their arrays show up every boot no problem. I'm using an Asus P6T6 Motherboard. Any help is greatly appreciated!
Click to expand...

I'm not sure whether it will actually have any impact on the problems you're having, but I have noticed that LSI have just recently released new firmware/driver updates for those cards which might be worth looking into.

http://www.lsi.com/channel/products/storagecomponents/Pages/MegaRAIDSAS9260-4i.aspx#four
 
young_einstein said:
I'm not sure whether it will actually have any impact on the problems you're having, but I have noticed that LSI have just recently released new firmware/driver updates for those cards which might be worth looking into.

http://www.lsi.com/channel/products/storagecomponents/Pages/MegaRAIDSAS9260-4i.aspx#four
Click to expand...

Thank you for telling me. I wasn't aware they had released new firmware this month. I'll install that soon. Contains quite a lot of fixes and changes actually!
 
So here is my storage box:
Chassis: Norco RPC-4224
Motherboard: ASUS P8B-E/4L
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1220v2
RAM: 8GB (2x4GB) Kingston DDR3-1333 ECC Unbuffered
RAID HBA: LSI MegaRAID 9261-8i (exact same as the 9260-8i except the 9261 is low profile with the SFF-8087 ports on the end instead of the top)
SAS Expander: HP SAS Expander
OS Drive: Mushkin Enhanced Chronos Deluxe 60GB
Storage Drives: 4 2TB Hitachi 7k3000 (RAID 5), 6 3TB Toshiba DT01ACA300 (RAID 6)
OS: Windows Storage Server 2012 Standard
RAID Management Software: LSI MegaRAID Storage Manager 12.08.03.03
RAID HBA FW Package: 12.12.0-0124
RAID HBA FW: 2.130.363.1846
RAID HBA FW Build Time: Aug 24 2012 17:18:05
RAID HBA BIOS: 3.25.00_4.12.05.00_0x05180000
HP SAS Expander FW: 2.06

I am trying to figure out why all of my drives have a link speed of 1.5Gbps.
Drive Speed: 6.0 Gbps
Negotiated Link Speed: 1.5Gbps

I have Tripp Lite S506-18N cables (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812228055) which are good cables. The only thing I can think of is my backplanes are limited at 1.5Gpbs? I doubt it though. Looking at HP's site, the latest FW for the SAS Expander is 2.08, which according to the notes, doesn't address my issue (which was supposed to be fixed in what, 1.58?).

Thoughts?

EDIT: Plugged 3 of my Toshiba's into the RAID controller, and they negotiated 6.0 Gbps, meaning my controller and the backplanes support it. Why does the HP SAS Expander only negotiate 3.0Gbps??

Speeds of a single Toshiba DT01ACA300 when negotiated 6.0Gbps maxed out at 247MBps read and 212MBps write with ATTO.
Speeds of a single Toshiba DT01ACA300 when negotiated 1.5Gbps maxed out at 175MBps read and 163MBps write with ATTO.

As you can see, I am loosing a bit of performance here.
 
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tycoonbob please edit/delete your double post here since you got replies to it in your other thread at http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1741898.


Anyway, is the issue from post #1 still in effect with the newest firmware with sata drives?: "HP SAS Expander will only negotiate SATA-III harddisks at 3G (SATA300) even though it is capable of 6G (SATA600). It does however negotiate SAS disks at 6G."
 
acesea said:
tycoonbob please edit/delete your double post here since you got replies to it in your other thread at http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1741898.


Anyway, is the issue from post #1 still in effect with the newest firmware with sata drives?: "HP SAS Expander will only negotiate SATA-III harddisks at 3G (SATA300) even though it is capable of 6G (SATA600). It does however negotiate SAS disks at 6G."
Click to expand...

Seems so as I'm using SATA III Disks, RAID and Expander and they only get negotiated at SATA II. Firmware is 2.08 on the expander.
 
how would the adaptec work in ZFS and unix? I've heard mixed things, i'm suffereing from iops issues on a 20-disk hp expander enabled setup
 
Hi,

I was wondering if anyone had run into the same problem as attached?

HYH92BM.jpg


All drives seem to be detecting:

FGGSCna.jpg


Setup is as follows:

CPU: Xeon 1230v2
MOBO: Intel S1200BTL
RAM: 32GB ECC
HBA: LSI 9211-4i (BIOS=7.29.xx, FW=15.00.xx) running in IT mode.
EXP: HP SAS Expander (Green PCB)
CASE: Norco 4224
DRIVES: 24x3TB WD

HBA is connected to EXP via port 8.

Trying to get this setup in Solaris 11.1. Though Solaris seem to freeze at the below stage:

http://i.imgur.com/aptRnLm.jpg

Any ideas on these two situations?

Regards,
cabishop
 
young_einstein said:
I'm not sure whether it will actually have any impact on the problems you're having, but I have noticed that LSI have just recently released new firmware/driver updates for those cards which might be worth looking into.

http://www.lsi.com/channel/products/storagecomponents/Pages/MegaRAIDSAS9260-4i.aspx#four
Click to expand...

I just wanted to follow up and say thank you for this advice. I just finally got around to doing some maintenance on the server so I upgraded the Driver, Firmware and MegaRaid Software and this does appear to have solved my problem. Straight after the firmware was upgraded (and the resulting reboot) the RAID Array's showed up in Windows Explorer straight away.

Thanks again :)
 
vicey, what raid levels are you using with the hp sas expander, and are you using hardware raid or software? what speeds are you getting?
 
gigatexal said:
vicey, what raid levels are you using with the hp sas expander, and are you using hardware raid or software? what speeds are you getting?
Click to expand...

Right now I have two arrays connected to the Expander which then goes to a LSI 9260-4i (Hardware Raid Card).

3x320GB in RAID0
3x4TB in RAID5

I get 250MB/s write on the 3x4TB in RAID5. I've not really benchmarked it so that is just what Windows Explorer tells me when I'm moving gigabytes of data from my other RAID cards in the same system (HighPoint 2320's not attached to the HP SAS Expander)

Overall I'm quite happy with the expander. I will be migrating that 3x4TB in RAID5 to 5x4TB in RAID6 soon.
 
Shit maybe my 9212-4i4e is problematic because I get 32MB/s writes with them connected to each other in raid5
 
Sounds that way yes. I have no problems with mine with the latest firmware and performance even before today has always been very very good.
 
the thing is that I get 450MB/s writes on raid-0 and 400MB/s reads
 
Hi
I Have got an Adaptec 6805 and would like to know if the HP Smart Array SAS Expander Card (468406-B21) is working with my 6805. Witch SAS Expander Chip is placed on the HP?
 
Blue Fox said:
If you search the thread, you'll find your answer.
Click to expand...

i have searched the thread. But only one said it worked but not in Dual Link Mode. But this was a few years ago. Maybe there are now another Users with this Raid-Controller and the HP SAS Expander. I have wrote an PN to the user, but i havent got an answer until now.
 
So i got the HP SAS Expander and it works with my Adaptec 6805 :)



At the moment there are only 12 Disks connected, i need more 8087 to SATA cabels. I have ordered them.
 
i recently upgraded from a hp sas expander to a 24port intel one and the intel one gets me sata 6gb speeds on sata drives whereas to get that on the hp expander you'd need sas drives.

nice to see it works with your 6805
 
gigatexal said:
i recently upgraded from a hp sas expander to a 24port intel one and the intel one gets me sata 6gb speeds on sata drives whereas to get that on the hp expander you'd need sas drives.
Click to expand...

That's been in the OP for 3 years so you're not shedding a light on anything previously unknown but if you're just running spinning disks then HP expander -> LSISAS2x36 based expander is really more of a sidegrade in terms of any net gains in throughput since spinners don't even saturate SATA-II. Yes transfer from buffer to interface is faster but splitting hairs and mostly meaningless where home media storage is concerned. Its for these reasons and others I ended up selling all my Intel RES2SV240's after running them side-by-side with the HP's for a time - they were gaining me nothing and the benchmarks showed it. Now had I planned on ever adding SSD's to the controller it would've been a diff story.
 
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forgive me for repeating info that's 3-years old.

I ran a quick benchmark and running my seagate disks on the hp sas expander to my 9212-4i4e in IR mode in a storage pool in windows hyper-V i was getting 450MB/s reads. Simply swapping the HP expander for the intel I got 940 MB/s reads.
 
Don't sweat it, it wasnt a criticism.

As for your speed doubling after switching expanders that's unusual and my first guess is you ended up with one of the grey market HP expanders that had a problem with not negotiating past SATA-150. Otherwise there's something else going on with your particular configuration because in all my testing speeds were within 1% of one another with 16 or 24 Seagate 3TB's connected either with an HP Expander or LSISAS2x36 based expander. Or hell, even 8 drives connected native to an Areca 1882i PCIe3.0 internal ports versus through HP expander speeds were pretty much same in benchmarks and raid array rebuild times.
 
well that doesn't bode well.

i'll have to sell it at a steep discount because i dont have a hp controller to flash it
 
Plug the card into an HBA and the enclosure model will have the firmware version number in it. Example from my Areca 1882i:

Enclosure#2 : HP HP SAS EXP Card 2.06(A)[xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
 
i'll do this as well thanks for the tip, i think if i remember right i saw it say 1.52, does that sound right?
 
I figured out why I had that problem with my Arrays not showing on boot up. I thought the problem went away after upgrading the firmware but it didn't. After a few cold boots it came back. I thought hard about the cause when one time I booted up and I got the message "SAS Topology Invalid" from the LSI controller.

So I thought maybe I have it wired incorrectly? It turns out I did. The problem was caused by using Port 9 for Hard Disks. This is the port on the card used for the controller when you use dual uplink mode. It appears that if you use Port 9 for hard drives you get flaky behavior.

So now that I've moved my drives to the other ports everything works perfect. The arrays appear on first boot every time even from cold. No more SAS Topology errors either.

Hope this helps someone else! - Again I'm using the LSI 9260-4i
 
Hello all. I recently purchased one of these expanders with the hopes of connecting it to my LSI 9261-8i and running a full load of drives in my 4220 case (running out of room fast on the single RAID5 array). Sadly when I hook it up is shows SATA drives only connecting at 1.5 (SAS connects normally), which seems to be a known though rare issue. I have read in here about "gray-market" cards (odditory mentions it above on this page in fact) but I don't think that is the case here. It came from a reputable seller (eBay), came in the HP Spares box with all the included items you would expect and matching serial numbers, and has firmware version 2.06. Still, I can not seem to connect any faster. Drives, both SAS and SATA, connected directly to the LSI card work as normal at 3.0 or higher depending on the drive.

So, suggestions? Would flashing or reflashing the firmware perhaps fix this issue? Any known settings that I may have missed mentioned elsewhere in this (VERY long) thread? I have tried searching and generally those that have this issue never seem to find a solution and either accept it or move to another expander. While this is not an I/O intensive system (basically a home/web server) I dislike the inability to fully utilize the speed of the drives.

In addition, I notice a number of people early in this thread would flash firmware for those that do not have an HP controller. Does anyone still offer this service?

Thanks
 
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