Sun F40/F80 to Seagate WarpDrive firmware (RAID Mode)

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raimond

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Oct 5, 2017
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I've been selling said Sun Oracle F40/F80 in my location for more than a year now. I recently received a message from a fellow member from our local trading site about him finding a way to flash the card properly so that it would run in full pcie x8 2.0 speed.

In this site below, you'll find the procedure.
Converting a Sun/Oracle F40/F80 Flash Accelerator to a LSI/Seagate Warpdrive | Kenneth Kasilag

Credits go to Mr. Kasilag for the procedure and to marcan for lsirec.

It took me 48 hours to confirm his findings, as I am not linux savvy. A day of reading, and asking around I was able to understand the instructions.

I hope this helps anyone out there who wants to convert their Seagate WarpDrive.
 

frogtech

Well-Known Member
Jan 4, 2016
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Do you still sell F80 drives? They are not as economical as the F40 on ebay and the extra capacity would be appreciated if I could get them for a great price, say, 8 of them?
 

BoredSysadmin

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Mar 2, 2019
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Excuse me. What exactly am I missing here? I see F80 is selling (USED) for $130 on ebay -
I also see 1Tb TLC 3D nand nvme modules are selling for about the same type of money these days.
From eBay product photos and description on linked article that it could be actually bootable (on an older platform), I assume that this LSI/Oracle/Sun SSD module is not NVMe, but more like a pair of 400gb SATA drives, stripped by LSI controller. Am I wrong here?
 
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svtkobra7

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Jan 2, 2017
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I assume that this LSI/Oracle/Sun SSD module is not NVMe, but more like a pair of 400gb SATA drives, stripped by LSI controller. Am I wrong here?
Sounds like you may have authored the "Sun Flash Accelerator F80 PCIe Card Description" @ Sun Flash Accelerator F80 PCIe Card Description - Sun Flash Accelerator F80 PCIe Card Security Guide, i.e. you are spot on, not NVMe.
  • "Four SSD flash memory modules: Total of 800 GB 24 nm eMLC NAND flash memory is directly mounted on the card.
  • PCI-E to SAS protocol controller: Sun Flash Accelerator F80 PCIe Card SATA interface to the protocol controller has a PCI-E 2.0 x8 host interface connecting to an LSI 2008 SAS/SATA 2 x4 6 Gbps protocol controller."
 
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BoredSysadmin

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Sounds like you may have authored the "Sun Flash Accelerator F80 PCIe Card Description" @ Sun Flash Accelerator F80 PCIe Card Description - Sun Flash Accelerator F80 PCIe Card Security Guide, i.e. you are spot on, not NVMe.
  • "Four SSD flash memory modules: Total of 800 GB 24 nm eMLC NAND flash memory is directly mounted on the card.
  • PCI-E to SAS protocol controller: Sun Flash Accelerator F80 PCIe Card SATA interface to the protocol controller has a PCI-E 2.0 x8 host interface connecting to an LSI 2008 SAS/SATA 2 x4 6 Gbps protocol controller."
well, that's the second question answered, but the prior one isn't. What am I missing here? Buying used SSDs could be a big risk, not just for regular wear, but wear on boot firmware partition doesn't actually have block relocation and bad block there could cause the whole module to be dead.
Why SSDs Die a Sudden Death (and How to Deal with It)
The prices as I've found (very brief search) doesn't seem to be encouraging.
Maybe the accelerators are somehow drastically faster than tlc nvme SSDs with slc cache? Somehow I doubt it. If these eMLC modules connected to raid controller even using 6g SAS, and LSI 2008 somehow magically and perfectly doubles the performance linearly, still it would far behind faster nvme drives like 970evo.

Am I wrong here?
 

Jordan

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Jan 26, 2016
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I bought mine for $80 each. These are enterprise drives with power-loss protection and high-write endurance (LSI says typical endurance is >22 petabytes written). The 970 evo is rated for 600TB written.

In my case, the drives each had 20-30 TB written, so they were barely used. Enterprise nvme drives with comparable endurance were out of my price range, and these drives are much faster than the single sata ssd I had.
 
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Oflyttbar

Member
Nov 4, 2017
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I've successfully flashed two F40's using this method. Thanks so much!

How do we go about reprogramming the SAS address into the card? I'm going to be running these both in the same system and don't want any conflicts. Is it an option in ddcli?
 

raimond

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Oct 5, 2017
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You can add WWN Address for the card using lsiutil

root @ terminal
lsiutil -e
Select adapter
Select option 18
Input the SAS address
Reboot

If you formatted the warpdrive before adding a SAS address the RAID array will be dropped and will become a foreign configuration, you will have to re-activate drives using lsiutil -e under RAID options.
 

raimond

New Member
Oct 5, 2017
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Manufacturing information can be programmed manually using lsiutil -e. The VPD requires a file.

Does anyone know how to make a valid VPD file?

I’ve been trying to figure that part out.
 

Oflyttbar

Member
Nov 4, 2017
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lsiutil -e and then I choose 69 (Show board manufacturing information)

Code:
Main menu, select an option:  [1-99 or e/p/w or 0 to quit] 69

Seg/Bus/Dev/Fun    Board Name       Board Assembly   Board Tracer
 0  131   0   0     NWD-BLP4-400
What manufacturing info are you trying to program? What are you trying to accomplish?

Are you referring to this part of the guide:

"Note that this also wipes out the VPD information containing SAS WWNs, you'll need to reprogram this region if you have more than 1 of these cards running."

Are you trying to reprogram the rest of the info that was in the VPD other then the SAS WWN?
 

raimond

New Member
Oct 5, 2017
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I'm trying to figure out how to program VPD.

I am able to set manufacturing information back after it is converted using lsiutil -e but not the VPD.

Since VPD information is not programmed, you will get "VPD information not programmed in this controller." error when you select 6. Show Vital Product Data when using ddcli.
 

pcpaulh

New Member
Jan 20, 2019
10
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I've been selling said Sun Oracle F40/F80 in my location for more than a year now. I recently received a message from a fellow member from our local trading site about him finding a way to flash the card properly so that it would run in full pcie x8 2.0 speed.

In this site below, you'll find the procedure.
Converting a Sun/Oracle F40/F80 Flash Accelerator to a LSI/Seagate Warpdrive | Kenneth Kasilag

Credits go to Mr. Kasilag for the procedure and to marcan for lsirec.

It took me 48 hours to confirm his findings, as I am not linux savvy. A day of reading, and asking around I was able to understand the instructions.

I hope this helps anyone out there who wants to convert their Seagate WarpDrive.
Hi, please excuse my ignorance! I'm prepping to flash my card. The section where you use the Hex editor, do you remove the section mentioned in the post and delete it and then save the bin file again? I can't see what you do with the 'copied' section further down the post. Thanks in advance.
 

Jordan

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Jan 26, 2016
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You will need to extract that section to use in the download firmware step with lsiutil. I used a hex editor to figure out the offsets and used the following command to extract that region:

tail -c +217 NWD-BLP4-800_13.00.08.00.bin | head -c 1028008 > subset.bin

This was on the 800GB Warpdrive firmware. I ran sha1sum on subset.bin to make sure I had the correct region. If you have the 400GB warpdrive, you should probably do it manually, as I don't know if the region would be in the same position in the other firmware file.
 

pcpaulh

New Member
Jan 20, 2019
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You will need to extract that section to use in the download firmware step with lsiutil. I used a hex editor to figure out the offsets and used the following command to extract that region:

tail -c +217 NWD-BLP4-800_13.00.08.00.bin | head -c 1028008 > subset.bin

This was on the 800GB Warpdrive firmware. I ran sha1sum on subset.bin to make sure I had the correct region. If you have the 400GB warpdrive, you should probably do it manually, as I don't know if the region would be in the same position in the other firmware file.
Great, thanks. I'll take a look.
 

Oflyttbar

Member
Nov 4, 2017
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That part of the guide was confusing to me too. I didn't realize I was suppose to copy anything from the firmware file until it asked to flash it further down, haha. If your using windows for the hex editor, just open the firmware file and copy the entire firmware section then open a new file in the hex editor and write/paste and save.

Also, if you get the firmware wrong by a few bits, when you try to flash it to the card it will complain about corrupted firmware and that it doesn't match. Basically it tries to stop you from doing it. Same thing if you try to flash an F80 to F40, lol.
 

pcpaulh

New Member
Jan 20, 2019
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Hi thanks. I copied it out (the part mentioned between two hex values in the howto and then saved it as a bin file.
Haven’t gotten around to flashing yet.