HP H220 (9207-8i) cards $48 OBO + FS

[K D]

Thanks @nthu9280

Got 2 @ $30 each for a friend

 

[trumee]

The listing & sticker on card say they are 9205-8i (PCIe2) but the chip is SAS2308(D1) which is 9207-8i PCIe3 card.
They've accepted $35 ea for 2 on my first offer.
Got the cards few days ago but just got to open them a little while ago. They do appear new bulk stock. At the time of the post they have over 260 in stock. Nicely packed.
Though these are already in IT mode, couldn't flash directly to 20.00.07. I used sas2flsh (P14 DOS) to erase and put P14 FW and then flashed to P20.

At $35 ( or possibly less) for new bulk, I think these are a better value than SAS2008 based used cards

New HP 660088-001 H220 2-Port SAS 6G PCI-E HBA SAS9205-8i | eBay

I could get the P14 firmware to flash (screenshot attached). Any tips?

 

[jmck]

Use version 14 of the sas2flash utility, it doesn't do the verification.

 

[trumee]

Unfortunately, there is no EFI version of P14 available. However, I used the FreeBSD utility to flash P14 and then upgraded to P20.

FreeBSD driver is P21 while firmware is P20.

# dmesg |grep mps
mps0: <Avago Technologies (LSI) SAS2308> port 0x6000-0x60ff mem 0xc7d40000-0xc7d4ffff,0xc7d00000-0xc7d3ffff irq 32 at device 0.0 numa-domain 0 on pci4
mps0: Firmware: 20.00.07.00, Driver: 21.02.00.00-fbsd
mps0: IOCCapabilities: 5285c<ScsiTaskFull,DiagTrace,SnapBuf,EEDP,TransRetry,EventReplay,HostDisc>

Controller,

# ./sas2flash -list
LSI Corporation SAS2 Flash Utility
Version 14.00.00.00 (2012.07.04)
Copyright (c) 2008-2012 LSI Corporation. All rights reserved

        Adapter Selected is a LSI SAS: SAS2308_2(D1)

        Controller Number              : 0
        Controller                     : SAS2308_2(D1)
        PCI Address                    : 00:02:00:00
        NVDATA Version (Default)       : 14.01.00.06
        NVDATA Version (Persistent)    : 14.01.00.06
        Firmware Product ID            : 0x2214 (IT)
        Firmware Version               : 20.00.07.00
        NVDATA Vendor                  : LSI
        NVDATA Product ID              : SAS9207-8i
        BIOS Version                   : 07.39.02.00
        UEFI BSD Version               : N/A
        FCODE Version                  : N/A
        Board Name                     : H220
        Board Assembly                 : H3-25278-05D
        Board Tracer Number            : SV42027965

        Finished Processing Commands Successfully.
        Exiting SAS2Flash.

 

[levifig]

8 natively of course but I think w/ cascading/expanders up to 256 if memory serves me correct.

Do expanders work like “overprovisioning”? I mean, if the card natively supports 8 drives, how can an expander increase that and not saturate the channel? #newb Thank you.

 

[Evan]

Do expanders work like “overprovisioning”? I mean, if the card natively supports 8 drives, how can an expander increase that and not saturate the channel? #newb Thank you.

An expander can of course get saturated but unless your running lots of SSD’s it does not really happen, 8 x 6G or 12G is a lot of bandwidth as not all disks will be busy at one time.
Can just consider it like virtulising the CPU, you have a limit of the total but the individual machines can still run to the maximum so long as they don’t do it all at once.

 

[scobar]

If you find after installing one of these cards your server does not post then disable the boot option room for that slot. I had issues with many of the HP controllers hanging server at boot, couldn't get into BIOS with card installed. The fix was to pop it out, pop in a nic, hit bios and disable boot option rom for that slot.

Yes you can use an expander with these...chenbro and intel worked here.

 

[msg7086]

Expanders are like network switches. You have 8 channels uplink and maybe 24 channels downstream, and those downstream links share the uplink speed.