HP xw8600 sas ports

[hput3]

Will be adding some sas discs to HP xw8600.  I'm completely unfamiliar with SAS and wondered since my machine is so old if I'm likely to run into incompatibilities or other unexpected problems getting some sas disks.   Are there certain types that will not work?  I've seen mention of sas1 and sas2 which do I need? or does it matter?

I've found a couple of refurbished sas discs with 2tb and nice prices.  I'm not sure if it is acceptable to post a URL in this message so will forgo on that until someone tells me its ok.  I'd like someone with some experience with the HP xw8600 and with sas ,to look at them .

So, please let me know if it's ok to post URLS here.

Another hardware question: I heard somewhere that using  a  HighPoint RocketRAID 2740 16-Port PCI-Express 2.0 x16 SAS/SATA 6Gb/s RAID Controller would allow me to go over the 2 tb limit on my machine, but I would'nt be interested  in using it for raid since I 'm running an offshoot of solaris and use the zfs filesystem. However I would like to be able to use 3 or 4 TB disks and could use the extra ports too. I wondered if a user of that card would either have to use some kind of raid or not use the card, that is if one could ignore its raid facets and just use the ports and bigger disks torun zfs on them.

[DGroves]

i'm going to hopefully convince you not to spend money on your xw8600 as it's very obsolete and only has pci-e 1.0 (not 2.0)

and no, you cannot bypass the 2 TB limit on the stock controller, and using a add in controller will only get you 3TB max as a boot drive (larger as a data drive)

and it's not win 10 compatible due to the cpu's lacking a instruction that is used by win 10

buy a HP z400 off ebay, they are very cheap, much much faster, and parts to upgrade are common and very cheaply priced on ebay

[savvy2]

this old 2008 chip (SAS)(onboard) does not do over 2TB  true. (1 drive but  I have 8 drives on some of mine  8 x2 is 16TB)<DL380G7

but most raid cards do that, and SATA too, as SATA is a subet of the SAS controller, and not the reverses

the PCI-e slots are slow but,  you can buy RAID cards that use  lots of lanes so the speed is NOT A PROBLEM.

you have x8 slots there, x8 the PCI-e lan speed, many raid cards do use 4 to 8 lanes, (mine has 😎

why RAID?

It does have and integrated raid chip ON BOARD. Integrated SAS Raid (LSI 1068X)

No RAID 6 ! that I like.

why not just put in a 1T SSD  ?

I have  Xw4600 here, with RAID tested vast ways, and all worked, great, even LSI9211 for $35 (IBM cross burned, trick)used.

I use mine only for  disk cloning .

that is correct some RAID card are 2TB  limited, some have  free Firmware upgrade that ends that but there are many cards.

My LSI9211 runs anything I want.   , Avago Technologies (which later acquired Broadcom Corp)

my 9211

the SAS 9211-8i provides 8 lanes of 6Gb/s SAS and is matched with 8 lanes of PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 5Gb/s performance to eliminate bottlenecks.

Buying SAS used disks?  question,  so make seller promises all SMART Test pass 100%

my xw4600, notes:

Note the 7 PCI slots and  the X38 chip drives the x16's 2 x FASTER to the express version 2  speeds!!  < best older MOBO made .

but yours is 5400 chip set. not x38 , I am surprised. data sheet shows, GEN2.

the same sheet says no Linux support but not sure Solaris, but 12 years later IDK.

.The LSI SAS integrated controller provides 1.5 and 3.0Gb/s SAS and SATA data transfer rates per port and enables Integrated RAID solutions in storage environs. 1068E , no idea me what X version can do.

If you have a SAS 3.0 Gb/s controller denoted as SAS-1. The LSI1068E is a SAS-1 controller. Then they won't be able to address more than 2TB for each device attached to it

he SAS 9211-8i provides 8 lanes of 6Gb/s SAS and is matched with 8 lanes of PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 5Gb/s performance to eliminate bottlenecks. No 2TB drive limit. (and can be flash upgraded or to RAID IR mode or IT , JOBD. easy)

you will not overload the 8lanes with any HDD there.(array) x1= 250MB/s, and all 8 is 8 times that raw.

2000MB/s is plenty for any SAS array. (a typical hDD is only good for 100MB/s each,the fastest is 200 I have 2)

That is my advice, get 9211 or even more ports, they come in port sizes. 2/4/8

I burned a IBM card (same chip) to LSI, no problems.

Good luck to you !!!!

[savvy2]

5400

page 345  (intel.com legacy and pain to find but did)

the Intel® 5400 chipset MCH supports up to four high performance x8 ports at on GEN 1 speed or up to two high performance x16 graphics PCI Express ports at revision 2.0 speed. This port contains several architectural enhancements to increase graphics performance.

this is the confusing part,  it is not homogeneous. ( 2007 chip is old and odd)

see on other mobo.

this

so find a cheap GPU card 4 or x8 lane old video card run that and free up 16x for RAID card.

[DGroves]

reading the intel chipset spec sheet is not necessary as what counts is did HP "utilise" all or some of the chipset features

and a quick look at the HP quickspecs (or xw8600 service manual) will tell you this

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c01300000

again, due to this workstation using very early cpu's that lack modern cpu instruction sets, usb 3, ddr3/ddr4 and pci-e 3.0

i would not recommend putting money into it

[hput3]

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@DGroves wrote:

i'm going to hopefully convince you not to spend money on your xw8600 as it's very obsolete and only has pci-e 1.0 (not 2.0)

and no, you cannot bypass the 2 TB limit on the stock controller, and using a add in controller will only get you 3TB max as a boot drive (larger as a data drive)

and it's not win 10 compatible due to the cpu's lacking a instruction that is used by win 10

buy a HP z400 off ebay, they are very cheap, much much faster, and parts to upgrade are common and very cheaply priced on ebay

---

Thx for the helpful input

My OS of choice is what started as Opensolaris and is now called Openindiana/hipster still basic Solaris in many ways

I've figured the upgrade I have planned to come out around $500 to $600, most of it for discs,  so those HP z400's would have to be really cheap.

If I get a new used machine I'm thinking  Z840 which is a couple versions newer and I believe does not have the 2tb limit. Plus I've seen a few with really high RAM.  at least 2 with 256 GB and quite a few with 96 or 128 GB

Prices around $1550 maybe a bit higher.

[hput3]

Thank you, Savvy 2.  Great detail and helpful information. I'll be studying on that for a while since I'm really quite green in this area.

I need to explain a bit about getting a RAID card.  First off, I don't want to use raid at all.  I hoped to use such a card for the extra ports and going above 2 tb limit only.

I'm running a solaris like OS using the ZFS file system.  I use a simple 2 disc mirror setup. That is,  for each `zpool' collection of zfs filesystems on a disk there is a mated disc mirroring that data.  So for each pair I get 50 % of the possible data. But it is redundantly backed up.

I hope its not completely idiotic to think of using a raid card in such a way.

I'm not sure if a hardware raid card can be used in such a way.  Probably should learn that answer right at the beginning.

Should have explained myself better in my initial post on this thread....

[DGroves]

cards such as the LSI 9211, have two different firmwares which can be flashed onto the card one is a raid bios (IR), the other is a normal HBA (Host Bus Adapter) SATA firmware (IT) which simply allows the card to add more standard SATA ports to a computer

note however that even though the LSI cards bios firmware supports disks larger than 2GB, you will be unable to make full use of this as the card  MUST make use of the xw8600's bios/EB2 chipset in order to operate and this xw8600 bios will still impose limitations on the LSI cards bios abilities  to a >3TB drive size for a bootable drive