HP MSA2040 SAN works with third-party drives - huge cost savings

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TuxDude

Well-Known Member
Sep 17, 2011
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So single-port 2.5" SAS drives are OK, but they would only be attached to a single controller so no high availability. HA is, for me anyway, the only reason to go with a SAN box like this over say a ZFS server, but good to know that at least they work in a pinch. Fingers crossed that your test with SATA drives also work - would be good to know.
Ok, so my memory was a bit off on the warnings you get with single-path drives. I found an old 320GB 5400rpm laptop drive, put it into the sled of a dead 36GB 15K dual-port SAS drive, and plugged it into a spare slot in a D2700 expansion shelf connected to a P2000G3 10GbE iSCSI unit. The array had no problems identifying the drive and would have been happy to create a vdisk with it to present to a host. Took a couple of screenshots from the web management interface - one showing the disk details, the other showing vdisk creation including the warning you get about single-path drives. Single-path disks do get controller failover, just not path failover. Of course that means you can't break the SAS paths one at a time to hot-add expansion shelves to the array if there are any single-path disks in it.



 
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Patriot

Moderator
Apr 18, 2011
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I actually have done very little work with the SANs ... Always into DAS like the D3700 (used to break 1m iops off single p430)
 

azev

Well-Known Member
Jan 18, 2013
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Just want to confirm; the P2000 G3 with 24 x 2.5" slot with FC controller can take regular non hp branded single/dual port sas drive without any interposer ?

Thanks
 

mstrzyze

Member
Nov 9, 2015
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hello

what about 4k 1.8 T SAS 10k Drives ? anyone can check that ( i'm waiting for chassis, then i need to find out controller :) )
 

Olim

New Member
May 20, 2019
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Just checked on my MSA 2050 LFF :
1. SAS OEM HDD working fine
2. SATA HPE HDD is not recognised on the system.