HI all,
I stumbled across a seller on eBay selling Dell 6TDVN SAS expanders for around $20. These are pulls from something (though I haven't been able to figure out what yet). They have three SFF-8088 external SAS ports and six SFF-8087 internal SAS ports.
I took a gamble and bought one, hoping maybe I could use it in place of some HP SAS expanders which don't support SATA3 speeds. When I got it, I pulled off the heatsink to find an LSI SAS2X36 expander chip. So far so good. It turns out that the power connector is a standard P4 12v CPU connector. I plugged it into a Dell H310 (flashed to LSI IT firmware 20.00.07.00) in a spare PC with a SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 cable and booted an Ubuntu Live CD. I was able to see the expander on the SCSI bus with 'lsscsi' and able to poke around its setup a little bit with a copy of xflash I found online (I recall the firmware was reported as version "00.50.00.00".
Happy with the test results so far, I went ahead and ordered 2 more. Then things started to get strange. The next day, I repeated the same connection test with the same cards and cables and I got nothing. No links detected, no sign of the card in the SAS topology at all. Since then I've tried all the expanders, a couple different cables, and a different HBA (a Dell H200, also with IT firmware flashed to it) and I keep getting the same results.
I have a SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 cable arriving tomorrow, just in case for some reason the expander cards became picky about what ports are used for uplinks and downlinks (even though the SAS2X36 isn't supposed to care).
Does anyone else have any experience with these SAS expanders or any suggestions on what I can try to make sure they work (short of replacing the HP expanders in my DASes and praying that they work properly)?
I stumbled across a seller on eBay selling Dell 6TDVN SAS expanders for around $20. These are pulls from something (though I haven't been able to figure out what yet). They have three SFF-8088 external SAS ports and six SFF-8087 internal SAS ports.
I took a gamble and bought one, hoping maybe I could use it in place of some HP SAS expanders which don't support SATA3 speeds. When I got it, I pulled off the heatsink to find an LSI SAS2X36 expander chip. So far so good. It turns out that the power connector is a standard P4 12v CPU connector. I plugged it into a Dell H310 (flashed to LSI IT firmware 20.00.07.00) in a spare PC with a SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 cable and booted an Ubuntu Live CD. I was able to see the expander on the SCSI bus with 'lsscsi' and able to poke around its setup a little bit with a copy of xflash I found online (I recall the firmware was reported as version "00.50.00.00".
Happy with the test results so far, I went ahead and ordered 2 more. Then things started to get strange. The next day, I repeated the same connection test with the same cards and cables and I got nothing. No links detected, no sign of the card in the SAS topology at all. Since then I've tried all the expanders, a couple different cables, and a different HBA (a Dell H200, also with IT firmware flashed to it) and I keep getting the same results.
I have a SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 cable arriving tomorrow, just in case for some reason the expander cards became picky about what ports are used for uplinks and downlinks (even though the SAS2X36 isn't supposed to care).
Does anyone else have any experience with these SAS expanders or any suggestions on what I can try to make sure they work (short of replacing the HP expanders in my DASes and praying that they work properly)?