HP SAS Expander Owner's Thread

I only require 24 ports, but I would prefer I have enough for dual-linking the controller to the expander, which brings me to 8x MiniSAS. I really only need to net 16 ports over the 8 I already have on board, in which case, the LSI SAS 9201-16i seems to be ideal. I just don't have any experience with it, nor can I find any real reviews.

If I skip the expander, and go with a bigger controller, then I also gain more bandwidth per disk.

Amazon is my go-to shop, but the problem is, I don't know what firmware revision I'll be getting from them, and I don't have access to the right card to update the firmware myself.
 
Honestly, the newer firmware revs are trivial ever since v1.52, at least for our purposes. I'm sure the card you'll get will be 2.x. Whether its 2.02 or 2.06 or 2.08, makes no real diff to performance - I've benchmarked every rev. Even a 1.52 card will work perfectly fine with SATA disks and SAS-2 RAID/HBA controllers.
 
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I'm returning the two HP SAS Expanders to Synergy, Dustin's company.

I just want to say that they've provided really great service, and that I'd happily order from them again in the future. I wish I knew what is wrong. I think for the moment, I'm going to skip using an expander and get the system running on half the backplanes. I'll reevaluate the build once I have it running successfully.

Thanks for you help, guys. If anyone wants to assist in any additional troubleshooting, or wants to offer an expander for me to try, I've got a thread on my build, and I respond to PMs quickly.

I would like to determine if the expander does actually work with my controller, so that we can update the OP to include compatibility one way or another.
 
I'm in fairfax if you want to test out your card. At the least, I can plug your sas expanders into my setup and see if it recognizes it and then we could try my expander with your card...

port 8 and 9 are labeled to go to the controller, I plugged my card into port 1, 8 and 9 and it worked. I dont remember if I plugged it into the other ports. I can test that this tonight/this weekend and see if it works.
 
Bookmage said:
I'm in fairfax if you want to test out your card. At the least, I can plug your sas expanders into my setup and see if it recognizes it and then we could try my expander with your card...

port 8 and 9 are labeled to go to the controller, I plugged my card into port 1, 8 and 9 and it worked. I dont remember if I plugged it into the other ports. I can test that this tonight/this weekend and see if it works.
Click to expand...

I appreciate the offer :)

Unfortunately, I've already agreed to mail my expanders back, so unless I want to delay shipping them by a whole weekend, I probably can't bring them to you to test. I would bring my controller, but it is integrated with the motherboard. The assembled system weighs (and frankly cost me) entirely too much for me to feel comfortable moving it in a car like that.

If you want to come up with another arrangement, I'd be happy to talk to you in private about it.
 
I saw a comment more then a year ago asking about 3ware's 9750 series
and wondered if anyone has or could try testing the 9750 with the expander at all to confirm that it indeed does or does not work.

I currently have a 16TB array on a 9650SE-16ML (SATA only, even though it has 8087 ports on it)
and was hoping to stick with 3ware since then I could just forklift my current 15drive array to a 9750 and keep my array.

Thanks!
 
anterus said:
Does anyone know if Intel Raid card RS2WC080 work with HP SAS Expander?
Click to expand...


since it's a lsi sas2008 based card, it should work since other sas2008 based cards have worked and i dont think intel would vary much to change it...

if you get it, you could test it out and let us know :-D
 
So, a question, if I buy Perc H200 PCI-E, do I need to flash it to make it work in some way ? Will it work with the HP SAS expander ?

Does anyone have experience with it ?

Thanks!
 
I'm using a H200 with a straight ZFS setup (no expander). Depending on the firmware version you have you may need to flash it to allow it to work with non Dell branded drives, and there are some fixes if you use the built-in raid 1/0 on newer firmwares, but otherwise no problems with it. (2008 based chipset, picked up fine in Solaris Exp 11). Don't have an expander though, so can't help you with that.
 
I got an HP Sas expander, FW on it shows up as 2.06.
I initially tried using a card I have on hand, LSI MegaRaid 8704ELP and I can see the expander (how I read the FW version on the card) but as soon as I hook up drives to the expander it dissapears and I can't see the drives either. I've tried both 8C and 9C without luck and tried moving the test drives around to 2,3,4C without them showing up.

Would that define this card then as incompatable with the expander?
and suggestions on what else I can try before giving up on this one?

(Also I tried just because to test with my 9650SE-16ML with and without drives attached and neither the expander or the drives showed up)

Thanks,
Steve
 
Has anyone actually tried using one of these HP SAS expanders work on the older P400s as I have one of these onhand and would prefer at least for the time being to not have to get another controller card.

JensS said:
I use a P400 on an Asus P5WDG2-WS - works quite fine ;)
With the old SCSI-RAID-Cards I had a lot of problems when used on consumer-boards whereas the P400 worked fine on different boards.

Just one thing about the P400: The write cache will be disabled when SATA-drives are used as a friend found out. (His test-setup was a P400 with HP Midline-Drives, a pair of 7.2k 500GB SATA and a pair of 7.2k 500GB SAS, so the same drives, just with different PCBs. According to him this also is mentioned in some service manual, for security and stability reasons... Ha ha...)
He is about to test if the P410 has the same restrictions rendering the controller quite useless for most of us...
Click to expand...

I use my P400 w/ non HP SATA drives also in a non HP machine and write cache is enabled, it's disabled if you don't have a battery though and unlike my LSI cards can't beforced to be on w/o one.


odditory said:
The P4xx controllers being useless for anything outside of a business environment and within an HP server was discovered a long time ago when the thread started - yes they're definitely useless in terms of how hard they are to manage and the performance you get out of them relative to the pricepoint. It takes DAYS to build even a modest 4-8 drive raid5 array with it.

While they work with the HP expander, for anyone buying new the P4xx's are the last card you should consider - again, unless you're in a business environment running HP servers.
Click to expand...

I find the HP array configuration utility quite easy to use, much easier than LSI's MegaRAID software (not that it's hard) and not any harder than others that I've used, however I'm not able to configure my P400 outside of the array configuration utility on my Intel server board or any other non HP MB I've tried it in, if that's what you meant I 100% agree. I'm about to put together a new to me Supermicro X7DWE board I'll see how it works in it.

I haven't used any of the new P4xx cards but my P400 takes well less than 1 day to build an array (I've never done more than 8 drives) it did take just over 1 day to expand a 4 2TB drive array, rebuilding arrays has also seemed to be fairly quick too.
 
lovemyram4x4 said:
I find the HP array configuration utility quite easy to use, much easier than LSI's MegaRAID software (not that it's hard) and not any harder than others that I've used, however I'm not able to configure my P400 outside of the array configuration utility on my Intel server board or any other non HP MB I've tried it in, if that's what you meant I 100% agree.
Click to expand...

Yes, the point is its a big hassle to install the HP supplied windows/web based management tools on anything outside of an HP server. A lot of manual hacking last time I tried. Not to mention overhead of extra unrelated services and a web engine running 24x7 on a server just to be able to manage a raid card - no thanks. Sure its fairly simple to use for basic management tasks (creating/deleting arrays) once its all working, but it feels like a mountain of crapware to get there. And there are a lot of limitations (expensive RAID6 software unlock = lame), no spindown, no JBOD mode for disks, the list goes on. If you ever look at something like an Areca and its featureset and excellent built-in web based management, then the dumbed down and feature-stripped nature of HP's raid cards and management becomes very apparent.
 
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@lovemyram4x4: Okay, I'll see, how my P400 will do with some SATA-drives, so far I have not tried this so far as the Savvios are a more interesting option. :)

@odditory: I had no problems getting the card working with Win 7 (or was ist 2k8 R2?), iirc the drivers came out of the box with Windows. The additional services are not a big problem as this is less or more a box just for the fun of fast storage.
 
odditory I never had problems installing either the CLI or the ACU versions on the non HP machines I've tried it on. The fact that it's feature stripped is probably what makes them so easy to configure and manage again not that the others are hard. I'm not sure about any overhead it would add as I never looked into, is this if you install the management utilities run locally, remotely or both? I never needed any expensive to enable RAID 6 on my P400 or the P600, the P400 did require a BBWC to be install, I guess that's something they added to the newer cards which I have no experience w/. No spindown is definitely a big down fall, I don't like that you can't get smart data w/ 3rd party apps but I think that's the case even on the ones that do if you have RADI5/6 arrays, though it doesn't have a JBOD mode you can still get the same results by just setting up drive as a single drive RAID 0. Sure an Areca has a lot more to offer but it's going to cost you, IMHO I think these HP smart array cards work well for something you get for under $100, maybe if I had problems getting them to work I wouldn't feel the same.

Thanks JensS, I was wanting to put one in 4U 20 bay case and it's the only PCI-e 8x card that supports RAID 6 I have available on hand and don't want to buy another card just yet.
 
I have a Highpoint 4320(Firmware 1.2.26.5) and an HP SAS Expander Firmware(2.06) in a Supermicro Motherboard C2SBA. RAID 5 (4 x WD 2002FYPS) RAID 6 (7x WD 2002FYPS)
Running Windows 2008 R2 Standad

The setup has been solid up until recently. I was copying data from the RAID 5 to the RAID 6 Volume and half way through the system crashed. As the system stayed responsive to pings it seemed to be just the storage system that had stopped responding.
I'm wondering if anyone using a Highpoint card has had any similar problems?
 
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Hi,

I've already searched the thread for "staggered", but I could not find definite answers for my questions:

Is there any known SAS controller + HP expander combination which supports staggered spinup?

In particular I'm thinking about buying a LSI 9211-8i controller and the HP Expander. According to omniscence's previous posts (see http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1035879911#post1035879911 and this following post http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1035897312#post1035897312) staggered spinup does not work with this combination. However, omniscence did have a lot of problems with the Expander in general which others did not seem to experience.

Does the HP Expander support staggered spinup at all? Is it already known which device (SAS controller or expander) actually has to support it? Only the Expander, only the SAS controller or both? What about staggered spinup and other expanders?

I'm in the need for staggered spinup because it's senseless to buy a 750-1000 Watt power supply in order to get up all drives. When all disks are idle, such a power supply will be utilized to 25% or less. In that case its efficiency rates are much lower.

----

odditory, you posted some graphs to show the scaling of a dual linked LSI 9211-8i here: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1036302170#post1036302170

Unfortunately, those graphs aren't available any more. Could you upload them again or does somebody else still have them?

Thanks to all for this great thread :)
 
Actually my only problem with the expander was that I could not get my drives to negotiate SATA2 speeds with the expander, while they flawlessly work with that speed when connected to the HBA. I tried two different HP expanders, firmware 2.02 and 2.06. I never had any stability problems.

Staggered spinup does not work when the expander is involved, however, the newer Samsung drives, namely the F3 and F4 series, seem to ignore the staggered spinup setting on my chenbro backplane anyway and spin up on power on. So it is not a loss in the end.
 
JensS said:
@lovemyram4x4: Okay, I'll see, how my P400 will do with some SATA-drives, so far I have not tried this so far as the Savvios are a more interesting option. :)
Click to expand...
...and as it seems the P400 and the P5WDG2-WS Pro won't work together...
While Percs are working fine the board won't even POST when the P400 is built in. So it may take some more days testing this card with SATA-drives.
 
mredz said:
I have a Highpoint 4320(Firmware 1.2.26.5) and an HP SAS Expander Firmware(2.06) in a Supermicro Motherboard C2SBA. RAID 5 (4 x WD 2002FYPS) RAID 6 (7x WD 2002FYPS)
Running Windows 2008 R2 Standad

The setup has been solid up until recently. I was copying data from the RAID 5 to the RAID 6 Volume and half way through the system crashed. As the system stayed responsive to pings it seemed to be just the storage system that had stopped responding.
I'm wondering if anyone using a Highpoint card has had any similar problems?
Click to expand...

I forgot to mention I'm running an Enermax 620W PSU as featured here: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles861/enermax_liberty_el620awt_620_watt_power_supply/index2.html

Perhaps I ned to upgrade this to make sure that its not a power supply issue?
 
mredz said:
No true. I have staggard spinup working with my Highpoint 4320 and WD RE4 drives no problem.
Click to expand...

Interesting. How did you configure your drives for staggered spinup? Switch on backplane? Which type of backplane do you use?
I think I have to retry the expander with a newer LSI firmware.
 
omniscence said:
Interesting. How did you configure your drives for staggered spinup? Switch on backplane? Which type of backplane do you use?
I think I have to retry the expander with a newer LSI firmware.
Click to expand...

I just switched it on using my RAID management software. I have a Norco 4224 providing the backplane.
 
I have a norco 4020 case with 10x 2tb western digital drives(EARS) along with a adaptec 5805 controller and a chenbro CK12803 ver. A1

I have had nothing but trouble with setting this thing up drives dropping expander drops in the middle of copying data etc.

Late last night I decided that the expander was just causing to many issues and removed it from the setup. I then setup 8x 2tb hard disks and had a drive drop in the middle of the night.

I searched the internet and found I had to set my drive speed to 1.5 to make them work with the 5805. This seems to be working now but I am having one heck of a time with this.

My question is, is the 5805 worth having and is there a expander that I can get to work with this?
How about the chenbro 12803?

My goal is to have 2 10x 2tb arrays in this case.
 
wow am I a newb, this site has really educated me. The 5805 will be on ebay once I get my 3ware 9690sa. it is only a month old and I should get more than I paid for it. I will also purchase a uek 13601 from chenbro and not buy any more EARS drives. I am now also looking into the 3 terabyte hard drives from hitachi.


sorry for the post in the wrong area
 
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I was wondering if it is possible to connect 2 raid controllers to the HP SAS expander. The first will be my server via internal 8087 connectors, and the second will be a workstation using a Areca 1880ix`s external 8088 connector.

The reason I`m asking is that I want my server to run 24/7 so that the files on the server is always accessible. But i also want to connect to a workstation whenever that is running, doing backups etc.

Best Regards,
TheRipper
 
I started a thread in Data Storage, but nobody answered, maybe Odditory or somebody else here will answer:

I have a Highpoint 4320, HP SAS expander, currently running 8X1TB Hitachi 64MB Cache drives in RAID5.

I want to purchase a gang of 2TB drives and go to 5X2TB in RAID5 for expansion in my Norco 4220.

This will give me two arrays:
8X1TB
5X2TB

Which brand/spec/etc is the best for that combo given NCQ/TLER/etc.? I don't much like the Green drives and considered grabbing 5 of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145473

Good/Bad/Disaster? Please refrain from "Deathstar sucks" comments. PMs welcome to prevent futher TJ.
 
I have 12 of the 7k2000s in a couple of sets of RAID5 for VMs. They work great.

I also have a bunch of them for sale since i changed my archive array to 5k3000s.
 
+1 on the Hitachi 5K3000. IMO, best drive right now for data archival, especially where striped arrays are concerned (hardware RAID, ZFS, etc).

As far as sourcing them, Fry's > Amazon > Newegg. I say Fry's because they sell retail package - meaning drive suspended in packaging thats superior to Hitachi's official OEM packaging that Amazon sells. Check Fry's on thursdays for new week's sale pricing - these drives go down to $69 or less frequently. Otherwise, anywhere else you can get the retail SKU is preferred. Amazon sells Hitachi OEM which is packaged less well than retail box as mentioned, and Newegg sells individual drives removed from OEM 20-packs which are then "repacked" by teenagers in the Newegg warehouse like the aspergers superstars they are.

/derail
 
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For Odditory or someone else who knows- I took the leap and purchased a 3ware 9750-8i and a 24bay norco.
Transplanted from my 15bay supermicro and so far it looks to be working.
My 4disk Raid10 for OS and 10disk 2TB hitachi array from my 9650SE-16ML showed up immediately without any issues so far.
I'm running some tests and will let it run for a few days.

Config Info-
Norco 4224

HP SAS EXP Card FW 2.06
(one odd thing I noticed was that it says "Slots 24", not that I need more but I thought the card supported 32)

3ware Model 9750-8i
Firmware FH9X 5.12.00.007
Driver 5.01.00.018

Disks:
WD6400AAKS 640GB x4 RAID10
2TB Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 x7 + Hitachi HDS723020BLA642 x3 RAID6
various ages from 2000-8000hrs

Any tests I should try or if you have recommendations on things to check?

Thanks!
 
Bookmage said:
Just to update, the IEI HPE-3S2-R10 is back ordered due to manufacturer part problems?

I was going to order the PE-2SD1-R10
but then I discovered this: HPE-4S2-R40 which looks like the same thing with an extra PCI slot.
it should be in the first week of April and i'll post back whether it works with the HP SAS expander. As of 03/24/2011 it's less than $5 more expensive than the 3 slot version, but still under $30 + Shipping.

Might be nice to link these parts in the OP as compatible power sources for those who want to use it in an enclosure with no motherboard.
Click to expand...

Is there any news on that? i intend to buy one of these but how do you switch in the Backplane with that? or is there any other hardware to switch on the powersupply and the harddrives?
 
Can anyone point me in the direction of a good setup(just raid controller/expander) for hooking up 3TB drives? I just bought a batch of them and I'm trying to absorb all the information in these forums.

I keep thinking I have a good plan but then the cards either don't support 3TB or possibly don't support SAS expanders.

AOC-SASLP-MV8 with SAS expander seem like a viable combo? I saw a few posts saying it now supports 3TB and it is definitely the right price.
 
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I read it a couple weeks ago and didn't even think to recheck it now that I know what I'm doing to some extent.

Thanks, and sorry.
 
Hi guys... A forum member mentioned to me that there are sellers on Amazon.com listing these boards as new.

I can assure you what they are listing is not new. What we have in stock are not new by definition either, but are tested, flashed to current firmware by HP techs, and then shipped out from the nations largest HP Renew Distributor.

If you guys need or have any questions at all, send me a PM. Glad to help where I can.
 
SynergyDustin said:
Hi guys... A forum member mentioned to me that there are sellers on Amazon.com listing these boards as new.

I can assure you what they are listing is not new. What we have in stock are not new by definition either, but are tested, flashed to current firmware by HP techs, and then shipped out from the nations largest HP Renew Distributor.

If you guys need or have any questions at all, send me a PM. Glad to help where I can.
Click to expand...

Oh, wow. I didn't realize these HP SAS expanders are out of production already. Is it so?
 
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Has anyone had any experience with the adaptec 6000 series and the HP SAS Expanders? I'm thinking of getting either the 6405 or the 6445. They actually seem pretty cheep for Canadians compared to alternatives with the same feature set.

Am I any better off to connect externally to the HP SAS expander or is internal fine?
 
Can't comment on the Adaptec cards, but it makes no difference whether you connect it externally or internally.
 
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