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SAS controller and port expander

L

levak

Junior Member
Hello!

We are building a budget disk array and we have decided to go with Norcotek RPC-4220 rack and Adaptec SAS 5805 controller(so we could use SATA and SAS drives).

Now we are facing a problem. Controller only have 2 SFF-8087 ports, but the rack tower has 5 of them(1 for every 4 drives). We are now wondering, how to expand controller's 2 ports to connect to all 5 ports on rack array.

If I understand correctly, we could do it with SAS port expanders. Is this correct?
What port expander is the right one? Can someone give me an example?
Will performance drop sugnificantly with port expanders?
Any other suggestions?

I know 1 controller is little for driving 20 hard drives, but there won't be much traffic. It will serve as an arhive for video files and a few SAS drives will be used to web pages...

Thank you for you help, Matej
 
You can use the older revision HP SAS Expander (not the new 1.5 or 2.02 firmware that enabled SAS 6.0 so the OLD cards) and that may work.

That card can easily drive 20 drives (I have one). The issue is that you need more ports. I would strongly suggest contacting Adaptec to see what they say regarding a working SAS expander. Odds are that they have a few that they have tested the 5805 with.

I switched to 2x HP SAS Expanders, one for each enclosure (one RPC-4220 and one RPC-4020) controlled via one Areca 1680LP which works with the HP SAS Expanders. Performance does get limited for each expander, assuming a single link to 12.0gbps, but that is about 10 drives worth of peak sequential throughput.
 
pjkenned said:
You can use the older revision HP SAS Expander (not the new 1.5 or 2.02 firmware that enabled SAS 6.0 so the OLD cards) and that may work.

That card can easily drive 20 drives (I have one). The issue is that you need more ports. I would strongly suggest contacting Adaptec to see what they say regarding a working SAS expander. Odds are that they have a few that they have tested the 5805 with.

I switched to 2x HP SAS Expanders, one for each enclosure (one RPC-4220 and one RPC-4020) controlled via one Areca 1680LP which works with the HP SAS Expanders. Performance does get limited for each expander, assuming a single link to 12.0gbps, but that is about 10 drives worth of peak sequential throughput.
Click to expand...


Hello, I just added a AOC-SASLP-MV8 and a HP SAS expander (2.02) to WHS. On first boot WHS asks for a driver for the HP SAS. I ignored it, and the hard drives show up in the console, but a yellow question mark pops up in device manager. It was my understanding the card is driverless. What is your experience with this? ThanKS
 
The HP SAS expander should be driverless. I believe the Supermicro cards need drivers. My expanders are connected to an Areca 1680LP (one via internal SFF-8087 and one via external SFF-8088).

Can you still use the drives even with the yellow question marks?
 
pjkenned said:
The HP SAS expander should be driverless. I believe the Supermicro cards need drivers. My expanders are connected to an Areca 1680LP (one via internal SFF-8087 and one via external SFF-8088).

Can you still use the drives even with the yellow question marks?
Click to expand...


The supermicro has the latest drivers. When WHS boots up, it specifically reports new hardware found HP HP SAS expander, and then asks for drivers. In device manager the HP HP SAS shows up with an alert that it is non functioning, no driver. I only have 3 drives attached to it. They all show up in console, and are not added to the pool. I have not added them to the WHS pool, because I wanted to make sure the driver issue with the SAS expander was fixed first.

So you never got a new hardware alert in WHS?
 
Never anything like that but... I'm not using the Supermicro HBA to connect the expander. Drives are detected in the Areca management, and then I pass disks to the OS/ Hypervisor.
 
pjkenned said:
Never anything like that but... I'm not using the Supermicro HBA to connect the expander. Drives are detected in the Areca management, and then I pass disks to the OS/ Hypervisor.
Click to expand...

I noticed on your site you are using the supermicro board. What processor are you running? It looks like there are 6 onboard SAS ports?. Will it do JBOD? I have a Norco 4220 and this looks appealing. I could just run the drives off the board?
 
the hp sas expander card has to enumerate itself to be part of the compliant spec but only grabs power.
 
bellaireroad said:
I noticed on your site you are using the supermicro board. What processor are you running? It looks like there are 6 onboard SAS ports?. Will it do JBOD? I have a Norco 4220 and this looks appealing. I could just run the drives off the board?
Click to expand...

I use a Core i7 920 on a Supermicro X8ST3-F. The onboard LSI 1068E is supposed to work with the HP SAS Expander, although I haven't tried that setup yet since I'm running everything off of the Areca card. The one disadvantage with the onboard LSI is that you are limited by raid 0, 1, and 10. If you end up just using something like WHS duplication, this doesn't matter. It is pretty cool though since there are basically 14 onboard SATA ports (6 ICH10R and 8 LSI). The board is fairly pricey, but for a smaller 7-24 drive system it may save the need to buy one more HBA for the drives which would be $100 anyway. Oh, and it has IPMI 2.0 which is priceless.

I'll probably post a bunch of better pictures monday or tuesday on the site.
 
Emulex said:
the hp sas expander card has to enumerate itself to be part of the compliant spec but only grabs power.
Click to expand...


It must be using some resources as well. I get BSOD every time the computer shuts down, and then it reboots. This does not happen if no drives are attached to it.
 
pjkenned said:
I use a Core i7 920 on a Supermicro X8ST3-F. The onboard LSI 1068E is supposed to work with the HP SAS Expander, although I haven't tried that setup yet since I'm running everything off of the Areca card. The one disadvantage with the onboard LSI is that you are limited by raid 0, 1, and 10. If you end up just using something like WHS duplication, this doesn't matter. It is pretty cool though since there are basically 14 onboard SATA ports (6 ICH10R and 8 LSI). The board is fairly pricey, but for a smaller 7-24 drive system it may save the need to buy one more HBA for the drives which would be $100 anyway. Oh, and it has IPMI 2.0 which is priceless.

I'll probably post a bunch of better pictures monday or tuesday on the site.
Click to expand...


So WHS will run on this board with no prob?
 
Yes. You do have to be a bit careful with memory selection and such (it is a supermicro) but all of the onboard hardware is really well supported. (Dual Intel Gigabit Nics, Matrox GPU as part of IPMI, LSI controller that is supported by almost every OS, ICH10R, and etc)

I would suggest that if you do go LGA1366 / i7, install Hyper-V Server R2 and/ or Windows Server 2008 R2 w/ Hyper-V and run WHS in a VM. The i7 and 6GB+ of ram with lots of expansion slots is frankly much more than WHS needs, and the i7 really runs VM's really well.
 
pjkenned said:
Yes. You do have to be a bit careful with memory selection and such (it is a supermicro) but all of the onboard hardware is really well supported. (Dual Intel Gigabit Nics, Matrox GPU as part of IPMI, LSI controller that is supported by almost every OS, ICH10R, and etc)

I would suggest that if you do go LGA1366 / i7, install Hyper-V Server R2 and/ or Windows Server 2008 R2 w/ Hyper-V and run WHS in a VM. The i7 and 6GB+ of ram with lots of expansion slots is frankly much more than WHS needs, and the i7 really runs VM's really well.
Click to expand...


Could you elaborate on the advanatages of running WHS on Hyper-V?
 
Sure. WHS uses very little CPU power except for DEMigrator.exe (will max out any single core you give it when running). If you do media encoding on the WHS, you will also see high CPU utilization of course. Other than that, and possibly anti-virus, hardware goes mostly unutilized.

Memory usage wise, I've never seen WHS use over 2GB.

With Hyper-V, you can have WHS run in a Hyper-V VM, off of a vhd. That VHD can sit on a raid 1 volume and/or be backed up like a normal file.

Furthermore, you can also run another OS on the same system. Here's an example: http://www.servethehome.com/8-nas-servers-virtualized/

Instead of having 8 servers, I have one running on a Core i7 920 w/ 12GB of ram. Even with 22 drives installed, I've never seen that chassis pull above 550w. It even has 2x Intel Pro/1000 PT Quad NICs + the two onboards, an Areca 1680LP, and a HP SAS Expander. Idle power is sub 250w... with 8 OSes running. The best part is that I can allocate additional CPU cores, NICs, and memory to the machine without opening the case. I have never hooked a keyboard/ mouse/ monitor/ CD drive up to the chassis either. Another somewhat cool thing is that you can basically get 10GigE between the VM's, so it saves on a lot of networking gear between the different VM's that are on the same box... that's not to say it doesn't have a total of 12 CAT6 cables coming out of it now (may add another this weekend), but it does give decently high performance interconnects.

Finally, I'm going to be testing the SAS Expander w/ some new Adaptec firmware this weekend. Stay tuned to see if they fixed the compatibility issues.

The one thing I like about Hyper-V is that it works really well with Microsoft OS's, and is stable... oh and free 🙂
 
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