HP H220 Drivers

T

TeleFragger

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Nov 10, 2005
Messages
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This is going to be a long post so I apologize up front!!! LOL

Years ago, I setup a machine - can be seen here with stablebit - https://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/5-my-rackmount-server/&do=findComment&comment=30081


It has been running server 2019 for few years and been great. SSD pool and SATA pool... all well... I started noticing that the pools were losing a drive here and there. That locks the pool, and you cannot add files until your resolve it.
I just built a new machine and it turned into a big ordeal where I ended up with a spare motherboard and CPU...

So, why not upgrade my storage server from an i5-6600 to an i3-12100F

I installed server 2022 and had issues getting the pools working again correctly and when i got them going, I had horrible drive performance restoring files from my 6TB SATA drive to the SATA pool. I then tried copying the files from the SATA drive to the SSD pool and no issues.
I had other issues like not being able to get the intel NIC drivers working in server 2022 and after a few hrs of googling, people said that Intel is doing that on purpose... something about server os on non server hardware.
I said screw it and dual boot Windows 11. Things were better, performance was better as I was copying files around and no real issues. Also NIC drivers were fine.


So here is where we are now.
Totally formatted the machine, installed windows 11, started getting the drives back in.

I couldnt get the SAS cards to see anything over 2tb with the default 2308 Mustang drivers from Microsoft, so I found HP H220 drivers from 2013 and things looked better but not great as the machine wouldnt recognize a 4tb drive or higher (I have 4, 6 and 10tb drives).
So after hard searching, I found a driver from Feb 2015 and now I can see more.

Interesting enough, I have a mess of drives and things are going great; however, I cannot add anymore drives. I have the cards setup like this...

HP H220 8-i
* Port 1 - connects to Port 1 of Etender card
* Port 2 - connects to 4 SATA drives (6tb and 3-4tb) and they are working

HP AEC-83605 Smart Array 12gb Pci-e 3 X8 Sas Expander Card
* Port 1 goes to H220
* Port 2/3/4/5/7 goes to 18 SSD ranging from 500gb - 1tb each
* port 4 from above has 2 not used so used 1 on a 2tb drive and it works

I cannot add anymore from here... is this a driver issue? I dont know.

Not sure where to go from here. I thought of reinstalling server 2019 and seeing if I can get it all working again but really, trying to "upgrade" to 2023 and not go backwards.

Not sure where the issue is here either...

Current Config:
Motherboard - MSI Z690-A DDR4 (latest bios from July 2023)
CPU - i3-12100F
memory - 4x16gb ddr4 2666mhz
HP H220-8i - SAS9205-8i - HP S/P 660088-001
Extender - HP AEC-83605 Smart Array 12gb Pci-e 3 X8 Sas Expander Card - SP# 761879-001

Drives - 4x 500gb SSD connected to Motherboard
4x NVMe - 256gb
18x SSD connected to IcyDock and SAS Expander Card
4x SATA connected to H220

cannot use anymore of the remaining 3 ports else disk manager just hangs... I am lost here...

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What firmware are you running on the card? Both version and manufacturer. If you plug the additional drives in, separate from disk management freezing or 0b in disk list do you actually see them in the drive list on boot from the Bios? If you change the three drives that you’re connecting to the additional ports on boot does iT make a difference which drives are on which port or is it any but the last three will work? Have you tried changing the cable that is servicing discs 25 through 27?
 
mwroobel said:
What firmware are you running on the card? Both version and manufacturer. If you plug the additional drives in, separate from disk management freezing or 0b in disk list do you actually see them in the drive list on boot from the Bios? If you change the three drives that you’re connecting to the additional ports on boot does iT make a difference which drives are on which port or is it any but the last three will work? Have you tried changing the cable that is servicing discs 25 through 27?
Click to expand...
interesting note... my old motherboard.. I saw the id list of drives buring bios before boot. I dont see that now.

Not sure fw versions. did this so long ago, i dont remember how I fw it to IT mode....
 
mwroobel said:
What firmware are you running on the card? Both version and manufacturer. If you plug the additional drives in, separate from disk management freezing or 0b in disk list do you actually see them in the drive list on boot from the Bios? If you change the three drives that you’re connecting to the additional ports on boot does iT make a difference which drives are on which port or is it any but the last three will work? Have you tried changing the cable that is servicing discs 25 through 27?
Click to expand...

What firmware are you running on the card?
Click to expand...
20.00.07.00
Both version and manufacturer.
Click to expand...
Dont know what manufacture bios but cant be HP as they stop at 15.
Have you tried changing the cable that is servicing discs 25 through 27?
Click to expand...
yeah i have

If you plug the additional drives in, separate from disk management freezing or 0b in disk list do you actually see them in the drive list on boot from the Bios?
Click to expand...
in MSI Bios, I can only see the 6 sata and 4nvme.. do not even show the drives that I can see in windows that are working with the card.
 
to add.. my old system, i would power it on and it would take a while, while the sas card looked for all of the drives. this one does not do that.. wonder why... newer motherboard so wonder if i need to turn something on in the msi bios?
 
I don't know your board at all, so in UEFI is there an option in the storage section for "Legacy" or "INT13"? If you enable them does the boot-time drive recognition return? 20.00.07.00 is the latest firmware compatible with that card (You probably crossflashed a basic LSI firmware to IT) per this site.
 
mwroobel said:
I don't know your board at all, so in UEFI is there an option in the storage section for "Legacy" or "INT13"? If you enable them does the boot-time drive recognition return? 20.00.07.00 is the latest firmware compatible with that card (You probably crossflashed a basic LSI firmware to IT) per this site.
Click to expand...

Put my old i5-6600k back in and wow....
so now it is not leading me to an issue with the card. It has to be my motherboard. New 12/13th gen cuz I put my old motherboard back and wow...
it is working right.

It sees my 4tb and 2tb drives and heck even shows the HBA bios screen to which the new MSI Z690-A DDR does not!!!!

What now? Guess ticket to MSI but what are they going to say...



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If they don't have a Legacy or INT13 UEFI option you may be SOL on that board. Unfortunately, there are quite a number of issues with Enterprise HBA's in consumer/prosumer boards. Even though PCIe is a standard, consumer boards do a number of things to make it more compatible/faster with video cards and that is to the detriment of other HBA that may find their way into the box. Which slot is the SAS controller in now, and what happens if you swap the video and HBA slots, or if you just swap to another x16 or x8 slot? I've seen boards that just choke on certain HBA, or even ignore the fact that you even installed it (even though the card and/or machine are perfect separately.) It really becomes a voodoo science, kind of like SCSI was back in the day where you had 5 devices in the chain but they only all worked in you ordered them 1-2-4-5-3 but otherwise only showed 1-3 devices of the 5 if they weren't in that particular order in the chain. I don't have all that much hair left, but quite a few strands were lost due to SCSI in the 80's and 90's!
 
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mwroobel said:
If they don't have a Legacy or INT13 UEFI option you may be SOL on that board. Unfortunately, there are quite a number of issues with Enterprise HBA's in consumer/prosumer boards. Even though PCIe is a standard, consumer boards do a number of things to make it more compatible/faster with video cards and that is to the detriment of other HBA that may find their way into the box. Which slot is the SAS controller in now, and what happens if you swap the video and HBA slots, or if you just swap to another x16 or x8 slot? I've seen boards that just choke on certain HBA, or even ignore the fact that you even installed it (even though the card and/or machine are perfect separately.) It really becomes a voodoo science, kind of like SCSI was back in the day where you had 5 devices in the chain but they only all worked in you ordered them 1-2-4-5-3 but otherwise only showed 1-3 devices of the 5 if they weren't in that particular order in the chain. I don't have all that much hair left, but quite a few strands were lost due to SCSI in the 80's and 90's!
Click to expand...

i feel ya.. i barely got hair either.. I too have been doing this.. my first OS was Dr Dos 7 and loved it!

is there a different 8i card I could get? price dont really matter cuz it aint gonna be that much as I want it done right.
 
TeleFragger said:
i feel ya.. i barely got hair either.. I too have been doing this.. my first OS was Dr Dos 7 and loved it!

is there a different 8i card I could get? price dont really matter cuz it aint gonna be that much as I want it done right.
Click to expand...
While it is always possible another LSI could work, unless you have a bunch to try there is no way to know. Put a ticket in with MSI and ask if they have a legacy storage setting that may make it more compatible, or try to work your way up to MSI engineering and see if they can replicate and resolve the issue. They will often say "No, that if you want enterprise support then you need to have enterprise hardware end to end,"
 
bought a 9300-8I IT-Mode from Amazon and should be here on Sunday. I didnt put a ticket into MSI yet... I will try that card and if not, free returns and will just rock my i5-6600k and move on... get it built back up. then sell my msi z690-a, 64gb ddr4 with i3-12100f and fan... at a loss but it is what it is...
need my plex storage server up!
 
TeleFragger said:
bought a 9300-8I IT-Mode from Amazon and should be here on Sunday. I didnt put a ticket into MSI yet... I will try that card and if not, free returns and will just rock my i5-6600k and move on... get it built back up. then sell my msi z690-a, 64gb ddr4 with i3-12100f and fan... at a loss but it is what it is...
need my plex storage server up!
Click to expand...
I don't really understand your setup, but just a heads up. IT Mode is for JBOD/OpenZFS. You want the normal firmware if you're running hardware RAID.

I've used two LSI cards with consumer motherboards (LSI 9201-16i with P19 IT Mode firmware on Asrock X370 Taichi and LSI 9211-8i with P20 IT Mode firmware on Gigabyte X570S Aero G) and I didn't have to mess with any BIOS options to get all the drives detected in my OS.
 
TeleFragger said:
i feel ya.. i barely got hair either.. I too have been doing this.. my first OS was Dr Dos 7 and loved it!

is there a different 8i card I could get? price dont really matter cuz it aint gonna be that much as I want it done right.
Click to expand...
God I really feel old now (And I am only 55.) My first OS was RSTS/E on a timeshared DEC PDP in '79.
 
Dopamin3 said:
I don't really understand your setup, but just a heads up. IT Mode is for JBOD/OpenZFS. You want the normal firmware if you're running hardware RAID.

I've used two LSI cards with consumer motherboards (LSI 9201-16i with P19 IT Mode firmware on Asrock X370 Taichi and LSI 9211-8i with P20 IT Mode firmware on Gigabyte X570S Aero G) and I didn't have to mess with any BIOS options to get all the drives detected in my OS.
Click to expand...

what dont you undersand of my setup? not much to it.
If this dont work, ill try one of those cards!
 
TeleFragger said:
what dont you undersand of my setup? not much to it.
If this dont work, ill try one of those cards!
Click to expand...
I didn't know if you were doing hardware RAID or not. But I guess by saying pools you mean storage spaces? In that case IT mode is how you want the firmware.
 
Dopamin3 said:
I didn't know if you were doing hardware RAID or not. But I guess by saying pools you mean storage spaces? In that case IT mode is how you want the firmware.
Click to expand...
No I am not doing hardware raid... storage pools is different than storage spaces. Stablebit drivepool from their site is..

Combines multiple physical hard drives into one large virtual drive.
Stores everything in standard NTFS (or ReFS) files.​

 
so I am wondering if i should replace the HP H220 as I am running Server 2022 now and I am having difficulties in finding drivers for it.
Just found some and it botched my system, so I am trying to get it to boot again.


The drivers for the HP H220 only go to 2014, whereas I have drivers for LSI running that are 2017. Server 2022 didnt like the built in Windows drivers and did ok with HP H220... but not great. still had issues so trying the 2017 and still not getting great results. thus me thinking it is time to go to a newer card?
 
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One of my main issues is after I reboot, a lot of drives (random ones all the time) go into offline mode and I need to right click, and put online...
1703613515625.png


I am not sure if this is a driver issue or not.

I have 42 drives and now only 33 are showing up so got to move stuff around and look... gonna be a long day.
 
TeleFragger said:
One of my main issues is after I reboot, a lot of drives (random ones all the time) go into offline mode and I need to right click, and put online...
View attachment 622717

I am not sure if this is a driver issue or not.

I have 42 drives and now only 33 are showing up so got to move stuff around and look... gonna be a long day.
Click to expand...
Stupid question, but do you have staggered spinup enabled for your hardware controller? It's just a guess, but that could be causing the random drop outs?
 
had everything going well and went to visit family. came back home to this.. so yeah random and frustrating..

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Here are advanced options in the card.

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While my MPT Firmware is 20.x, I see NVDATA Ver is 14.x... wonder if that is ok.

I do not know much about this side of things and it is frustrating..
 
TeleFragger said:
where is that setup? i gotta check...
Click to expand...
I've no idea, other than I remember seeing (years ago) some brands having it to help with a large number of drives. Spinning up a bunch at once could cause issues with power, and staggered spin up helped in that situation.
 
arestavo said:
I've no idea, other than I remember seeing (years ago) some brands having it to help with a large number of drives. Spinning up a bunch at once could cause issues with power, and staggered spin up helped in that situation.
Click to expand...
all good.. thx for thinking bout it.. it is confusing and frustrating... i dont mind buying a diff card if it fixes it.. i just dont get it.
 
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