HP SAS Expander Owner's Thread

Anyone use the HP controller cards? the P212 or 411 or anything? How's the RAID on them? Or are they only good as dumb controllers (just for ports) ?
 
Bookmage said:
Anyone use the HP controller cards? the P212 or 411 or anything? How's the RAID on them? Or are they only good as dumb controllers (just for ports) ?
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I have a P411 which I used to flash the expanders but I'm probably going to dump it soon, the array build and rebuild times are dreadful. I put 8 x 1Tb in RAID5 and 72 hours later the thing was still chunking along before I said "forget it" and terminated the operation. Who knows maybe the I/O throughput is actually decent once the array is built - it is a SAS-2 chip after all,, but I'll never know, because I don't *want* to know. I need a raid card that won't leave my array with its pants down in a degraded state for days on end when its rebuilding the array after a drive failure. Maybe I'm spoiled but I won't settle for any card that takes longer than 24 hours to rebuild an array regardless of size, and these days with other cards on the market, I don't have to.

Couple that with the fact the management software is an utter pain to install on anything but an HP server, and it's fail.
 
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I remember asking about SAS expanders a couple of years ago, didn't get too much feedback - this expander looks like a really cool option for a relatively inexpensive large storage array for non-critical use.

Besides the HP SAS Expander, are there any other options around? I saw some references to Chenbro expanders that aren't really available anymore, are there other options, and will the extra bandwidth of SAS2 matter much with a ~16 drive array?
 
sethk said:
I remember asking about SAS expanders a couple of years ago, didn't get too much feedback - this expander looks like a really cool option for a relatively inexpensive large storage array for non-critical use.

Besides the HP SAS Expander, are there any other options around? I saw some references to Chenbro expanders that aren't really available anymore, are there other options, and will the extra bandwidth of SAS2 matter much with a ~16 drive array?
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If you're serving on the lan, it won't matter at all. If it's in a workstation or a server crunching through lots of data from the array and limited by linear disk speed then yes.
 
After reading this thread and the one on avsfroum (and drooling), I want to get an Areca 1680X, HP SAS Expander and Norco 4220. Living in Canada, I usually buy from www.ncix.com. Here are the prices I can get them for (prices in CDN)

Areca 1680X = $539.99
HP SAS Expander = $451.71
Norco 4222 = $337.17

Total = $1328.87


The only seller on eBay that ships the HP SAS Expander to Canada wants over $400 for it. I can get items shipped to a US location near the border and drive over to pick them up, so I am looking for suggestions as to the best places to buy these items.

Thanks in advance.
 
michelkenny said:
....
The only seller on eBay that ships the HP SAS Expander to Canada wants over $400 for it. I can get items shipped to a US location near the border and drive over to pick them up, so I am looking for suggestions as to the best places to buy these items.

Thanks in advance.
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Have about the same problem here in Sweden :/

Searching for some one that whant to send it to Europe.
 
hotneutron said:
Can you elaborate? Adaptec 1045 uses Marvell 88SE6440 chip. The same as Areca ARC-1300-4X... Both are supported by mvsas module...
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Sure, I can see the expander and drives on my Areca 1680LP, but when I plug it into the 1045 I can't see the expander, nor the SAS drives on it. Same result with both expanders. I'm thinking it is another Adaptec firmware issue since the Adaptec 5805 has issues with the expander even though the Areca boards using the same IOP chip are fine.
 
Lots of requests for these cards, but again, I cannot ship outside the US, our contract with HP does not allow it. If someone wishes to organize a group buy, to disperse cards abroad, I can arrange to have a qty of them flash upgraded, then shipped out.

Thank you guys-

Dustin
 
SynergyDustin said:
Lots of requests for these cards, but again, I cannot ship outside the US, our contract with HP does not allow it. If someone wishes to organize a group buy, to disperse cards abroad, I can arrange to have a qty of them flash upgraded, then shipped out.

Thank you guys-

Dustin
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Ok, thanks Dustin.
 
ok so now we are 3 members (Me+Merlinen+michelkenny) that live outside the us and want the HP card. Lets organize this group buy....
 
Me + Fyxim and some other guys from a Swedish froum is gona organize a group buy to Sweden.
 
hotneutron said:
Can you elaborate? Adaptec 1045 uses Marvell 88SE6440 chip. The same as Areca ARC-1300-4X... Both are supported by mvsas module...
Click to expand...

Those two cards may share the same chip but how the vendors went about implementing them is another thing. The Areca 1680 series and Adapter 5 series also share a common chip, the Intel IOP348, but obviously they have drastically different firmware, enough that the Adaptecs generally won't work with the HP expander, except for a few cards that a v1.00 HP expander works with at 1.5Gbps SATA rate.
 
Do you think it's possible to flash the Adaptec with Areca firmware? There should be no way to brick a PCI card, shouldn't it?

odditory said:
Those two cards may share the same chip but how the vendors went about implementing them is another thing. The Areca 1680 series and Adapter 5 series also share a common chip, the Intel IOP348, but obviously they have drastically different firmware, enough that the Adaptecs generally won't work with the HP expander, except for a few cards that a v1.00 HP expander works with at 1.5Gbps SATA rate.
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hotneutron said:
Do you think it's possible to flash the Adaptec with Areca firmware? There should be no way to brick a PCI card, shouldn't it?
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Not possible and you would kill it. Just because the processors are the same, doesn't mean the rest of the hardware is.
 
odditory said:
@nitro did you mean to say 1680ix-24? If so it's apples and oranges. I have a strong feeling those old dropout problems were due to the onboard expander rather than the IOP348 raid chip. Testing has shown even drives like the infamous Seagate 1.5Tb's w/ CC1H firmware that were so problematic for people and dropped out of arrays can't seem to be phased when using HP expander on EXTERNAL port of 1680ix-24 (the only connector not routing through onboard expander). I've been beating 8 of them up in RAID6 for almost 2 weeks now- building, rebuilding, winthrax, and not a single hiccup or timeout. If I attach them to the internal ports of the 1680ix-24, the first one drops out within minutes to an hour. They won't even get 5% into array build. The onboard expander in high port count Areca and Adaptec cards are seriously suspect since it's night and day difference in dropout issues.

Unfortunately I sold my WD20EADS drives before I got the chance to test on HP expander, but I *think* he'll be alright. All you can do is test for a week or two before entrusting data. In the case of the Hitachi 2TB's, they don't ship with ECR (TLER) enabled either. Then again the Hitachi's don't have "minds of their own" like WD GP drives that go to sleep, low power idle, and other power saving behaviors independent of the raid card. Whereas Hitachi fully supports these APM features, they're defaulted to disabled. The WD GP's seem to have them defaulted to ENABLED based on what I've read, but I'm not 100% on that.

If a drive really does get kicked because of taking too long to respond during a deep error recovery cycle (trying to remap bad sectors), I say no big deal, take the drive out, run a full surface scan, let it remap its bad blocks (or RMA the drive if they're excessive), put it back in array and let it rebuild. If that happens too often for comfort, think about switching to another model of drive. If *I* got a deal on the drives I'd probably try to work around any issues that came up too, which they may never.
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I always suspected it was something like this. I did testing on an ARC-1222 and I am pretty sure it doesn't have an expander as it doesn't support SAS expanders (as far as I know). We have about 80 machines using them now with 8x 1TB seagate AS drives. The 333AS and 528AS drives work with absolutely no issues and I have only seen problems with the 340AS's (which have kind of known to suck) which were only used once on accident (as none of our newer drives are 340AS's.
 
Areca 12xx doesn't support SAS expanders because it's not a SAS card. 1222 is a completely different generation ROC (Intel IOP341) and is a native SATA chip, whereas the IOP348 on the Areca 1680 and Adaptec 5 series is a native SAS chip emulating SATA.
 
odditory said:
Areca 12xx doesn't support SAS expanders because it's not a SAS card. 1222 is a completely different generation ROC (Intel IOP341) and is a native SATA chip, whereas the IOP348 on the Areca 1680 and Adaptec 5 series is a native SAS chip emulating SATA.
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The 1222 uses the IOP348 and is SAS. It just doesn't support expanders (it actually looks identical to the 1680i, so it must be a firmware difference).
 
Blue Fox said:
The 1222 uses the IOP348 and is SAS. It just doesn't support expanders (it actually looks identical to the 1680i, so it must be a firmware difference).
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Seconded. It uses an 800 Mhz iop348 instead of the 1.2 Ghz as well. I am not aware of any low profile areca card that uses an iop341 as the only ones I know of that are native SATA and low profile use the iop333 or earlier.
 
My mistake, good catch. My impression was the 12xx series were all previous generation IOP341 but I haven't spent lots of time looking at anything but the 1280ML. Back to houkouonchi's original point though: his findings with the Seagates posing no problems or timeouts in testing is likely just because the 1222 has no onboard expander, and just more confirmation of the theory about the incompatibility troubles resting on the onboard expander on "ix" Areca cards.
 
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Can you try to boot into OS to see if it's visible there? Thanks.

pjkenned said:
Sure, I can see the expander and drives on my Areca 1680LP, but when I plug it into the 1045 I can't see the expander, nor the SAS drives on it. Same result with both expanders. I'm thinking it is another Adaptec firmware issue since the Adaptec 5805 has issues with the expander even though the Areca boards using the same IOP chip are fine.
Click to expand...
 
odditory said:
My mistake, good catch. My impression was the 12xx series were all previous generation IOP341 but I haven't spent lots of time looking at anything but the 1280ML. Back to houkouonchi's original point though: his findings with the Seagates posing no problems or timeouts in testing is likely just because the 1222 has no onboard expander, and just more confirmation of the theory about the incompatibility troubles resting on the onboard expander on "ix" Areca cards.
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Just as another thought, I went 15-0 in 12 months with 15x 7200.11 drives never a single dropout... well except the one time I had mislabeled a drive and pulled the wrong one ;-) This was an Adaptec 31605 so not sure if it was the older IOP or a different onboard expander.
 
For folks with the 1680 non-expander cards (LP/i/x), can someone clarify the size of the cache and the IOP348 frequency? The Areca website has them at 512MB/1.2 GHz, but most retailers (such as Newegg) as well as an older Areca datasheet for the 1680 series spec them at 256MB/800 MHz.
 
odditory said:
I have a P411 which I used to flash the expanders but I'm probably going to dump it soon, the array build and rebuild times are dreadful. I put 8 x 1Tb in RAID5 and 72 hours later the thing was still chunking along before I said "forget it" and terminated the operation. Who knows maybe the I/O throughput is actually decent once the array is built - it is a SAS-2 chip after all,, but I'll never know, because I don't *want* to know. I need a raid card that won't leave my array with its pants down in a degraded state for days on end when its rebuilding the array after a drive failure. Maybe I'm spoiled but I won't settle for any card that takes longer than 24 hours to rebuild an array regardless of size, and these days with other cards on the market, I don't have to.

Couple that with the fact the management software is an utter pain to install on anything but an HP server, and it's fail.
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I'm not sure what you mean by all that. The array is perfectly usable directly after creating it. All it does is a parity initialization in the background (for a very long time, granted) but your array is usable from the get go with more than reasonable performance (450M/sec sequential read/write and more).
Even a degraded array is still usable. Depending on the rebuild priority I remember seeing ~30-50 MB/sec read/write worst case.
The online expansion or rebuilding of an array that is in use is indeed very slow (up to 6 days to expand a 4 2TB disk RAID5 to a 5 disk RAID5).

I had no problem installing the HP drivers and array management tools on several Dell workstations and my DIY Intel server board based home server (Windows Server 2003R2 32bit, Windows Server 2008R2). The only thing you have to dick around with is the firmware update CD for the SAS controller or non Windows systems. The P410 and other HP RAID controllers can be flashed from Windows without any work around.
 
What I mean is what I wrote, which is that the array build time was excessive (to me). I didn't say the array was unusable. And 6 days to expand a 4-drive Raid5 by one drive is also unacceptable (to me). If HP were selling these cards for $99 maybe I'd think different, but once you add up all the hidden costs like the software unlock key for Raid6, or the upgrade to 512MB cache with BBWC battery module, then the card really makes no sense given the alternatives. As well, the management GUI and CLI both felt very light on options and settings.

No offense to you since you own one, just an opinion since some people are reading this thread wondering which raid card to buy. Right now its *very* hard to recommend a P41x.
 
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odditory said:
What I mean by all that is exactly what I wrote, which is that the array build time was excessive to me. I didn't say the array was unusable. And 6 days to expand a 4-drive Raid5 by one drive is also unacceptable. If HP were selling these cards for $99 maybe I'd think different, but once you add up all the hidden costs like the software unlock key for Raid6, then the card really makes no sense given the alternatives. In the management GUI *and* the CLI I also felt a lack of options and settings to have control over.

No offense to you since you own one, but the point is directed toward people reading this thread wondering which raid card to buy. Right now its *very* hard to recommend a P41x.
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Has anyone tried a Perc5/6?
Those can be had on ebay really cheap and is good alternative to an Areca for the budget conscious.
 
FYI no need to quote when you're just replying to the previous post, otherwise it makes threads really lonnng... :)
 
odditory said:
What I mean is what I wrote, which is that the array build time was excessive (to me). I didn't say the array was unusable. And 6 days to expand a 4-drive Raid5 by one drive is also unacceptable (to me). If HP were selling these cards for $99 maybe I'd think different, but once you add up all the hidden costs like the software unlock key for Raid6, or the upgrade to 512MB cache with BBWC battery module, then the card really makes no sense given the alternatives. As well, the management GUI and CLI both felt very light on options and settings.

No offense to you since you own one, just an opinion since some people are reading this thread wondering which raid card to buy. Right now its *very* hard to recommend a P41x.
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Fair enough. It just wasn't clear to me what you meant by the first part. And you are also right that there aren't may options to play around with. You have your stripe sizes and expand/rebuild priority settings. Dividing the cache between read and write in 4 steps, and some (useless) advanced options when you buy the RAID6 license and that's about it. You cannot read the SMART values of individual drives (those might be hidden somewhere in the 200 page diagnostic report somewhere). There is no spin-up or power down on the drives or the arrays and all the other useful tweaks you get with Areca.
 
While we're on about Areca alternatives, any thoughts on the Highpoint SAS controllers using the IOP348s (RocketRaid 432x) series? I know a lot of folks (including me) have historically had no love lost for Highpoint, but has anyone tried them with the HP or Chenbro expanders? I ask because they are significantly cheaper than the equivalent 1680s, though from comments I've seen about poor tech support/lack of firmware it seems you get what you pay for.
 
nitrobass24 said:
Has anyone tried a Perc5/6?
Those can be had on ebay really cheap and is good alternative to an Areca for the budget conscious.
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I'm going to give it a try but finding a (relatively inexpensive) cable is hard. The Adaptec cables are I-SASx4-mSASx4-0.5M (2254800-R) or I-SASx4-mSASx4-1m (2254900-R) but it seems to be discontinued and only available overseas. If someone can find these stateside somewhere that would be awesome.

I'm going to assume since Adaptec made both SFF-8484 to SFF-8087 and SFF-8087 to SFF-8484 that the cables aren't simply reversible and are directional, otherwise I would just buy one of the ones off fleabay, grr.

Otherwise I can snag a generic, $36 shipped to me, which is a bit hard to stomach for testing on a ~$100-$150 card.
 
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