Astek A33606 expander experiences

[mobilenvidia]

Am awaiting the arrival of the above for mentioned expander.
Never played with expanders before and found this one on Ebay for a reasonable price.
It's not a more common Intel or Chenbro, so am taking a risk, but risks are what life is all about.

It looks to be a 24 port out
4 port external in
4 port internal in
4 port external out (daisy chain)
Using LSI LSISAS2x36 36 port 6Gbps expander

What I liked is that it doesn't have to go in a PCI slot, just give it a HDD 12v power supply and you can put it in any enclosure
Also comes with a fan (no shown in picture below), so a smaller enclosure or tight space can be used.

I hope to get my 6x2TB drives out of my system and into an enclosure.
So having both internal and external in ports ideal for both worlds
Extra fan headers I may even get to use in an enclosure, awesome feature

So, some more rantings to come on how I get on ... or not.

Capabilities:
2 External SFF-8088 connectors (x4 SAS lanes each)
7 Internal SFF-8087 MiniSAS connectors (x4 lanes SAS each with SGPIO side-band)
Gen2 6Gbps Performance
SGPIO support for all SAS lanes
RS232 Management port
3 x standard 3-pin Fan Supply/Control headers
10-pin100mil GPIO header for I/O & LED control

 

[mobilenvidia]

Ordered a few sets of cables to wire this and drives up, nearly forgot.

For internal LSI9266 to SFF-8088 expander in

I can play with my broken LSI9202 and use the mini HD SAS SFF-8644 external ports on this to SFF-8088 on expander
Only $19 for 2m cables dirt cheap.

Internal SFF-8087 SAS to internal SFF-8087 expander

Bought a couple more sets of SFF-8087 to SATA (correct direction) to play with some more combinations of drives.
Looking forward to taking this for a spin.

 

[mobilenvidia]

Expander is here, now waiting on cables to hook this up to Controller as I can't use it at all.
But plugging in power, I get a green solid LED and a heart beat LED so thats good.


Click for closeup

 

[mrkrad]

how do these cost compared to direct connect 1:1 ?

psst can you mod the esxi nvidia driver to support more cards?

 

[mobilenvidia]

how do these cost compared to direct connect 1:1 ?

psst can you mod the esxi nvidia driver to support more cards?

$200 for 24x 6Gbps ports (other 12 ports are in/out)
These are going to house the RAID6 array and have some cache cade as well

I had a look at esxi NV drivers a few months back, they are simply too hard to mod
Even just getting in them is a mission, then to compile it all back again.
You'll need to vBIOS mod your card to fool esxi

 

[mobilenvidia]

Woohoo, SFF-8087-SFF-8087 cable turned up today.

Pulled 2x SFF-8087 cables (going to 6x HDD, 2x SSDs) from LSI9266 placed them in expander (J6/J7)
Booted up, my 6x 2TB drive RAID5 array lost 2x drives.
Put J6 cable in J8 all is good.
Both 6 drive RAID5 array and 2s SSD RAID0 boot arrays were there, Win8 booted of the RAID0 array with no prompting.
Swap was very painless, I'll sort out J6 drive issue later.

I attached 2x more SSD's to port J9, to experiment with Cachecade on a Expander.
Cachecade can't be setup via an expander !!
To make this work all the drives need to be on the expander via 1x SFF-8087 cable
The other controller SFF-8087 (or 8088 on an external controller) needs to go directly to the SSDs

In MSM the expander shows up with its own icon, doesn't show any drives hanging from it though
And there is even a grapics tab to that should show temp and fan speeds, but doesn't.

I'll do have some piccies later.
Also attempt to flash FW to it, possibly even non Asetek

 

[mobilenvidia]

Let this be a lesson to all:

DON'T go skiing (winter here) come back all tired then attempt to flash the Expander.
I managed to clear the Firmware, but was unable to get the FW to the ecpander as the SAS address was gone too

I have since ordered a DE9 to RJ11/12 adaptor but one where I can arrange the pins
I'll be able to wire up the connector to suit both ends
I have a USB to COM converter from my Satellite Firmware hacking days, can use this.
Asteks programmers works best via the serial port on the expander.
So will see if I can make it live again

 

[MiniKnight]

No good. Hope ya get it working again MNVDA!

 

[mobilenvidia]

Yes, will be a good 'How to project'
I think the Astek manual is wrong with pinouts for DE9 connector
I doubt pin7 (RTS) needs grounding on the Astek RJ11/12 side, think it should be Pin5 (Gnd-Gnd)
I bought adaptors where I can change the pinouts so can change at any time

 

[mobilenvidia]

Expander lives again, got the above DE9 to RJ12 adaptor, found a 4 pin RJ11 cable at work, in all my collection I could only find 2 pin RJ11's, need 4 pin version as to use pin 5 for ground.
Serial connection anything is painfully slow.

Expander is working again, heart beat LED is good to see again.

 

[mobilenvidia]

Been trying various OEM firmwares.

Intel FW works
Chenbro FW works
AXUS doesn't work

Also tried Intels MFG file turning the expander into a Intel RES2CV360-R
This makes the SAS Fault LED flash, controller still seems to work.

Serial connection makes the above pretty well bullet proof...so far

Now need to do some benchies

 

[mobilenvidia]

Hmmmm, so far slow performance via expander.

Copying 500GB from RAID6 on LSI9266-8i to 4TB WDC drive as JBOD via Expander on IBM M5016
I'm getting <50MB/s occasionally bursting to 200MB/s I know the 4TB WDC can do 150MB/s so its not that.
It's connected at 6Gbps

Must do some more investigating.

What a giant mess my desk is now there are cables and drives all over the place, going to make it worse just glued the HS to the LSI9202 and am going to run dual cables out to the expander

 

[mobilenvidia]

Interesting.

Just flashed both the latest Intel FW and MFG to the expander
Now it's a fully fledged RES2CV360R
MSM even reports it as one.
Did at first complain sensors out of range but fan is spinning as normal.

Drives attached are there and working
Do how ever have to keep making the 2x SSD's I've got in RAID0 active good, and then import them.
Not sure why this is, does it with Astek FW too.

 

[33_viper_33]

Interesting thread! Keep us posted on your progress.

 

[mobilenvidia]

Glued up Heatsinks on the LSI9202-16e (well 8e) got a go.
Both external ports connected to expander
Both channels are used, Daisy Chain out is also 2nd SAS port in.
Makes no difference in my slow speed which I need to work out.

Now I have the expander on the LSI9266 with one port going to external in on expander
Other sas port on 9266 is connected to 2x SSD's in RAID0 and Win 8.1 is booting from this.
All other drives are spread over 4x SAS ports and I still have 2 to free.
My desk is now a giant shamozzle of a mess
I'm using 2x Mobo's one just to power the expander as case is too congested now.

Hmmm, now I can create a Cachecade array on the expander.
Wonder why this is, Intel FW or because I'm using different ports on the expander
Some drives on the expander look like they are connected direct to the LSI9266, I wonder if this is a passthrough.
Hmmm so much testing to do, but I'd better get to bed before the sun comes up.

 

[mobilenvidia]

OK,
Port J3 Target on the expander looks to passthrough from Host Port, hence the drives appearing as being attached to the controller, must keep this in mind
Port J4 Target might do the same thing via the Chain port, will test

I only have 1x SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 cable, but I might try plugging this into Chain port, then plug SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 in to respective Target in on expander (ie use 1x internal Host port and 1x external)
Will test the RAID0 boot on LSI9266 port and put on Target J3
This will make my cabling jungle even worse.

[UPDATE]
Thats all hooked up.
Took for ever to boot, got the battery bad or missing error, VD is in WT mode
But it all works
Both the Internal Host and external Chain (now also a host) are flashing their activity LEDs, as the RAID array is going through a CC

BUT, Port J4 target is not passing through to the Daisy Host port

Here are all the drives attached
Boot RAID0 in Port J3 all the rest scattered around other Ports

 

[mobilenvidia]

Very cool discovery (for me)
Excuse me if this is old hat but didn't think this would work.

2x Computers with a LSI controllers each (LSI9202 and LSI9266)
All the drives plugged into the expander
On Expander:
1x 4port SFF-8088 in from LSI9202
1x 4port SFF-8088 in from LSI9266

Now both computers are sharing all the drives
This is so cool.
I'll be able to have one low powered system to keep files handy on for sharing around the house
And I'll be able to crank up my old Xeon x3470 to crunch numbers when I need it
I'll need to do some rearranging of gear now.
But won't be able to use the 9202 as it won't see the Array's, but the ServeRAID M5016 should

 

[pgh5278]

A very positive bonus...

 

[mrkrad]

yeah you should get a P2000g3 with 8 SAS ports really slick to do 4-way cluster with one

 

[Jeggs101]

Wait.... how does that work with SATA drives? Do you just partition some drives to each server or are you using the same drive across two systems for HA or something?