Two PERC H310 cards in a Z220 - won't see both

[FR172]

Alright, the expander is here, and it works like a charm:

https://imgur.com/a/WTNg8Ik 

Next up, hooking a Netapp DS4243 (technically a DS4246) up to the expander.

[APeng]

I've used Dell H310 cards with IT firmware in multiple computers without issue. And I've even used 2-3 of them in the same machine. So, i don't think it's a problem to have multiple H310 cards in a computer.

Do you need to boot from the H310 card? if not, I recommend erasing the LSI BIOS ROM (and UEFI ROM if you have it) completely from both cards to see if that works.

On HP Z800 at least, the SMBus from the H310 card causes DIMM slots to be disabled. I don't know about Z220, but it's probably a good idea to tape the B5/B6 pins on both H310 cards.

[FR172 · Accepted solution]

APeng, that's actually a good tip. I did experience one of the 4 DIMMs to be not existent, and I believe taping the pins fixed that - but I have not had the chance to actually test and verify that. The Z220 is living up to it's price tag, I guess 😄

And I am 100% certain that the Z220 is NOT CAPABLE of handling more than one H310. It can handle one H310 plus a different HBA/RAID card, such as a HP SmartArray P212, but not two H310s at the same time.

As for removing the LSI BIOS ROM and/or UEFI ROM, the cards did come without them, confirming that it won't have any impact (at least on a Z220).

And last but not least, I was able to hook up a Netapp DS4243 (actually a DS4246, since the seller replaced the 3GB with 6GB modules) to the H310 using the external SAS port on the HP SAS extender (HP 487738-001).

The external SAS port on the extender is officially only for connecting a tape storage, but it does work passing through the (so-far) 7 drives I have in the Netapp enclosure, effectively connecting 17 4TB SATA drives and 2 500GB SATA drives to the server machine.

My final thought: I chose the Z220 due to it having a i3 CPU, and since it was supposed to be room-temp/cold storage, energy efficiency of the i3 over a Xeon CPU (which I have in a few Z420 machines that I have deployed). If I'd have to do it again, I would go with a Z400 series machine with Xeon as base, or even go a whole 'nother way, as in FreeNAS running on low-power hardware.

Anyways, thank you all for your help, I'm finally happy with my solution and learned a ton of new stuff, which is part of the reason I put these projects on myself to begin with.

Cheers!