Seagate 8tb Archive drives on LSI HBA


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Is anybody using Seagate Archive 8tb drives on an LSI HBA (I'm trying to work with a 9201-16E, connected to a MD1000 15 bay chassis).  The system appears to see one drive (after an abnormally long initialization process), and another 250gb drive (just another random drive I had and stuck in another slot).  9201-16e has P20 flash on it, and in the card's config, it shows the MD1000 box as an enclosure, but doesn't show any drives (even with just the 250g installed, shows no drives, no negotiated speed, or anything).  

 

I have a SAS31601E that detects the enclosure correctly, and actually shows the drive underneath it (but of course it won't work past 2.2tb).

 

Just wondering if I may need to get a newer card..  I've got an Areca 1680ix-24 that I'm going to test with the enclosure tomorrow, but it won't fit my Cisco UCS (WAY too long, lol), but I'd rather find a LSI card with external ports that I can connect to the MD1000 (and possibly an internal port, one of the 4i4e cards would be ideal if it works with the 8tb drives).

 

 

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Looks like for 'certified' compatiblity from LSI/Broadcom, I need a SAS 9207-4I4E.  Going to grab one from Newegg, hopefully with next day shipping it'll be here Friday..  I'll report if this works with the enclosure/8tb/etc, if it does I'll have an Areca 1680ix-24, a 1231ML 12 Port, the 9201-16e to get rid of..

 

 

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When I use the older card (the 31601e), and drives are inserted I can see them all in the card's bios, but the 8tb drives don't have the correct capacity.  The 'power' light on the drive trays also lights.  With the 9201, the 'power' light on each individual drive never comes on, nor does the activity light work.  The new card I have on the way is a Gen3 LSI card, so I'm hoping it's got better support for the 8tb Seagates (it's on their compatiblity list for that specific card).  

 

I'm hopeful that it's not the MD1000, as I'm too far into the cost on it to replace it now (those trays weren't cheap, wish I'd have found one that already included them when I got the chassis).

 

I'll make sure to post the results after the new card, just in case anyone else tries this, may save them some time and money.

 

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On 6/1/2017 at 3:17 AM, johnnie.black said:

Not currently but I've ran them on a 9211-8i without any issues, I suspect the problem is on the MD1000 side as it has an expander built-in.

 

I got the new card in, and it fits in the Cisco box without any issues, and even has room (barely) for the internal 4 drive bays cable to reach and plug into the internal 8087 port.  As long as I plug the 8tb drives into those trays, they work perfectly fine.  If I move any of them to the MD1000 box, they aren't detected (or one is, the other drives in the box aren't).  Every other size drive I've tried with the MD1000 work fine as well (up to a 4tb model), just the 8tb's have issues.  Anybody have an external box with an expander that actually works with those 8tb drives?  I'm thinking a Norco DS-12D, as it's basically just 12 drive bays hooked to 3 external ports, no expanders.  Since the drives work plugged into the front panel, I would assume it'd work as well.

 

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How many bays do you need? External SAS boxes are not very common and usually very expensive, found a cheap one recently on ebay, the Xtore XJ-SA12-005-B, it's a 5 bay SAS enclosure (with an expander) and works well, I first bought one to test and because I liked it and the seller was selling them so cheap at around 40€ each, and despite not knowing what I'm going to do with them I couldn't help myself and bough 4 more. :$

 

Like the MD1000 it's an older SAS1 model and these sometimes have some quirks with SATA devices, I've been testing mine and for a week and it works great with Samsung, Toshiba and Seagate (including 4 x 8TB archive) but doesn't like it when it's full of WD greens, i.e., with 5 x 2/3TB greens it only detects 3 or 4, haven't tested different WDs yet.

 

Performance is good, I expect to get 1100MB/s max (it's a single link SAS1 expander) and using the fastest disks I have I got max speed (5 x 200MB/s), so pretty happy with that.

 

There's also a 10 bay model (XJ-SA12-010-B), although I expect them to be pretty rare and performance won't be so good as the same 1100MB/s link will be shared by the 10 disks.

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At a minimum I need 8 bays, 12 bays would be better, 16 would be max I'd ever need.  I'm looking hard at the Norco 12D, which basically has 12 bays, with 3 8088 ports each directly connected to each bay in the chassis (at least I think that's how it's connected, that's how it looks anyway).

 

NORCO DS-12D External 2U 12 Bay Hot-Swap 6G SAS / SATA III Rackmount RAID / JBOD Enclosure

 

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I Know this is an expander, but wonder if it'll work with the Archive drives?  1 8088 in, 4 8087's to internal drive sets.  If it'd do the 8tb's (or larger even), that coupled with the 16-bay 8087-equipped Norco case would be perfect for what I want.  Probably take a speed hit though (2 ports in, with 2 8087's each would even be more ideal speed-wise).

 

 

http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA_new/series_EJ340-Overview.htm

 

 

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Got all the hardware in today, and moved everything over to the new setup (Main server is now the Cisco C200 M2 box w/dual x5650 6-core Xeons, 48G ram, 9207-4i4e Controller in the 8x slot, with the internal port connected to the 4 bays in the Cisco box, connected to a 500g SSD, 300GB 10k Raptor, and 2 4tb WD Reds in a Raid-0 config for parity, 1 external port connected to the Norco 12D box, with 4 Seagate 8tb Archive drives.  Cisco box has a 9201-16e in the 16x slot, with 2 ports connected to the other 2 ports on the 12D box, with several 3tb and 4tb drives).  Since I went from an Areca card to the LSI cards, I had to reformat and reconfigure the parity drives, so it's running a parity rebuild at the moment.  Not getting the greatest speeds (it's been bouncing anywhere between 30m/sec, and 140m/sec, averaging around 80m/sec).  I started a preclear of the new 8tb I added, and it shows it's running at 208m/sec).  The Areca card usually ran parity at around 120-130m pretty much all the way through a check, so either that card is just much faster (it did have a cache module and battery on it, but I can't remember if it had write caching turned on or not).  I'm definitely happy with the responsiveness of the new box, it's definitely faster than my old 8-core AMD FX setup...

 

(Yes, there are 2 C200's in there, plus the MD1000.  The 2nd box is running Unraid also, with a single VM running Windows 2016 Server, with our Altaro Offsite backup server set up on it for our Hyper-V box at the office).

 

 

2017-06-09 21.19.52.jpg

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10 minutes ago, heffe2001 said:

Not getting the greatest speeds (it's been bouncing anywhere between 30m/sec, and 140m/sec, averaging around 80m/sec).

 

It won't be the controller bandwidth as that would be a fixed max, not bouncing around, if there's nothing accessing the array during the sync and nothing on the syslog it can be a disk with slow sectors or some other reason.

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I'm running the latest RC on that machine, and with the Azure skin loaded.  I also have it set to show the write/read speeds on each drive.  If I have the browser on any screen other than Main, it looks like the speed creaps up to about 125m/sec and stays there, but if I go back to main, it starts bouncing around.  Maybe something to do with the polling for the drive speeds?  I'm going to leave the system be for tonight without a browser connection, and see if the speed holds..  Since I'm doing a parity rebuild, I do have the Turbo writes enabled.

 

Other than a bunch of ACPI warnings being logged, it's been a fairly uneventful move to the new box.  Especially if the speed actually holds with not monitoring the speeds..

 

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