ah man that sux but thanks for the offer still Patrick, hopefully someone else with the same card will chime in and give their input as well.
Intel RES2SV240 24-port SAS2 Expander Wiki
- Thread starter odditory
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Has anyone used this Intel RES2SV240 expander card with IBM M5015 RAID card?
If so does it work? Does it generate the "Warning" messages in the log?
If so does it work? Does it generate the "Warning" messages in the log?
I got a very good deal on an Adaptec 6805 + ZMM but when it came to finding an expander for it there was not a lot of compatibility info out there (or at least I failed to find it).
Reports were sketchy, and most of them about issues rather than success stories.
So for the record I'm running an Adaptec 6805 with this expander and so far so good. All 20 drives (ST3000DM001 firmware CC4H) are detected as SATA III and mounted, array (RAID 6) built without issues, has been problem free for about a month now.
As you can guess from my choice of drives is not a high-availability SAN
so I don't know how this combination would behave on a production environment, but again for a production environment I'd probably have gone for an LSI card anyway, so this is purely academic.
I have a 4220 instead of a 4224 but the chassis is pretty much the same.
You could also drill holes, countersink them (so they don't interfere with the rails) and use regular standoffs if you don't trust glue, but in my case I didn't' want to take the whole system apart and I don't feel comfortable drilling the enclosure with the system fully assembled, so glue it was.
Edit:
I've taken a pic to illustrate what I wrote above. One image (despite not being a very good photographer) is worth 1000 words
Reports were sketchy, and most of them about issues rather than success stories.
So for the record I'm running an Adaptec 6805 with this expander and so far so good. All 20 drives (ST3000DM001 firmware CC4H) are detected as SATA III and mounted, array (RAID 6) built without issues, has been problem free for about a month now.
As you can guess from my choice of drives is not a high-availability SAN
so I don't know how this combination would behave on a production environment, but again for a production environment I'd probably have gone for an LSI card anyway, so this is purely academic.I glued three of these to the wall adjacent to the lowermost PCI slot and bolted the expander to them. These gave me a bigger surface to glue over regular standoffs.
I have a 4220 instead of a 4224 but the chassis is pretty much the same.
You could also drill holes, countersink them (so they don't interfere with the rails) and use regular standoffs if you don't trust glue, but in my case I didn't' want to take the whole system apart and I don't feel comfortable drilling the enclosure with the system fully assembled, so glue it was.
Edit:
I've taken a pic to illustrate what I wrote above. One image (despite not being a very good photographer) is worth 1000 words
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It does the job, and in RAID6 the performance is good. When you factor in that I got it for less than half the price of a LSI + hardware key + battery I think is good value for money.
But what's made it a viable investment is this expander. I haven't read many success stories with the HP one, the LSI2x24 based Chenbro expander retails for £70 more and comes with just one SFF-8087 cable (and disappointingly enough the LSI2x32 based one does not support link aggregation and is £100 more) and couldn't find the RES2CV240/360 this side of the pond (if I'd have managed to source the RES2CV360 "locally" I'd probably have purchased the 4224 housing).
Without this expander I'd have considered the 6805 a flop...
Surprisingly able. It was originally a HTPC, but as this was an experiment I tried to keep the expenditure to a minimum, so I recycled it into the WHS2011 box. It runs Starwind iSCSI SAN fine, streams movies fine, takes care of the backups with no hassle, runs squeezebox server, iTunes server, usual stuff... I did add a decent dual NIC (Intel i350-T2) though, the integrated Realtek NIC you find in "budget" boards is... hmmmm... less than able
If I were to buy new hardware I'd probably have gone for a desktop ivy bridge board and an i5, but as it turns out it would have been overkill for my application.
Finding drivers was a bit more challenging than usual, but fortunately AMD is back to releasing beta drivers, and leaked beta drivers often include stable versions of AHCI, USB filter, SB etc etc for server platform. Forget about using the integrated USB3 though...
Hi, I am having some issues connecting a 3 TB drive to one of these cards, Windows Home Server 2k11 sees it as one physical harddrive, splits it in one 2TB and one 0.7TB volume.
My setup is motherboard -> M1015 -> bracket -> bracket -> RES2SV240 -> harddrive
This is what it looks like:
My setup is motherboard -> M1015 -> bracket -> bracket -> RES2SV240 -> harddrive
This is what it looks like:
MrT0ad, what model Thumb Nut (ex. 816-204 or 816-206 or 816-208, etc...) did you purchase to match the size/screw hole of the card?I got a very good deal on an Adaptec 6805 + ZMM but when it came to finding an expander for it there was not a lot of compatibility info out there (or at least I failed to find it).
Reports were sketchy, and most of them about issues rather than success stories.
So for the record I'm running an Adaptec 6805 with this expander and so far so good. All 20 drives (ST3000DM001 firmware CC4H) are detected as SATA III and mounted, array (RAID 6) built without issues, has been problem free for about a month now.
As you can guess from my choice of drives is not a high-availability SAN
I glued three of these to the wall adjacent to the lowermost PCI slot and bolted the expander to them. These gave me a bigger surface to glue over regular standoffs.
Its a brilliant idea!!!
I've been searching around to find an answer to this both externally and on the STH forums and all I can find are links saying "it should work". Here's my question. I have a m5014 (cross flashed to the most recent 9260-8i firmware). I have it linked to the RES2SV240 (subject of this thread/wiki). When I check the megaraid UI, it tells me that only ports 0-3 are in use going to the expander.
Troubleshooting:
1) To make sure it wasn't a cable issue, I switched (on both sides, then criss-cross to eliminate a bad port on either side as well) and ended up having it always say that only ports 0-3 are in use.
2) I even only connected the cable from ports 4-7 on the 9260 to either 0-3 or 4-7 on the expander and the card shows it using ports 0-3 every time, which I didn't expect, but can understand.
In reality, this is fine for that I'm doing. As I read, the ports are aggregated on demand and the 24Gb/s (4x6Gb/s) is going to be more than enough for the drives I have on the expander. And, I get more usable ports this way. I just wondered if anyone had seen this behavior. There is no "configuration" I'm aware of that I would need to do.
Thanks! -Jim
P.S. I made sure the expander is on the most recent firmware.
P.P.S. If this should have been it's own thread and not appended here, my apologies. I'll be glad to break it out.
Troubleshooting:
1) To make sure it wasn't a cable issue, I switched (on both sides, then criss-cross to eliminate a bad port on either side as well) and ended up having it always say that only ports 0-3 are in use.
2) I even only connected the cable from ports 4-7 on the 9260 to either 0-3 or 4-7 on the expander and the card shows it using ports 0-3 every time, which I didn't expect, but can understand.
In reality, this is fine for that I'm doing. As I read, the ports are aggregated on demand and the 24Gb/s (4x6Gb/s) is going to be more than enough for the drives I have on the expander. And, I get more usable ports this way. I just wondered if anyone had seen this behavior. There is no "configuration" I'm aware of that I would need to do.
Thanks! -Jim
P.S. I made sure the expander is on the most recent firmware.
P.P.S. If this should have been it's own thread and not appended here, my apologies. I'll be glad to break it out.
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I can confirm that the expander supports dual-linking. However, I only have used LSI 9211-8i controllers. The link state is shown by lsiutil and by Linux sysfs.
Also, the bandwidth (actually it is a signalling/interface rate) is 4x6 Gbps (Gigabits per second), not 4x6 GB/s (Gigabytes per second). Thus, the raw bandwidth without protocol overhead is 2.4 Gbyte per second.
The dual link definitely influences my bandwidth because there are still 3 Gbps SATA drives attached. While those are transmitting/receiving, the whole link between controller and expander is basically slowed down to 3 Gbps. Well, that may not be totally correct, perhaps it only slows down a single PHY per active drive at a time. But I can prove it by benchmarks.
Code:
SAS2008's links are 6.0 G, 6.0 G, 6.0 G, 6.0 G, 6.0 G, 6.0 G, 6.0 G, 6.0 G
B___T SASAddress PhyNum Handle Parent Type
500605b00140eb20 0001 SAS Initiator
500605b00140eb20 0002 SAS Initiator
500605b00140eb20 0003 SAS Initiator
500605b00140eb20 0004 SAS Initiator
500605b00140eb20 0005 SAS Initiator
500605b00140eb20 0006 SAS Initiator
500605b00140eb20 0007 SAS Initiator
500605b00140eb20 0008 SAS Initiator
5001e67464ecffff 0 0009 0001 Edge Expander
0 1 5001e67464ecffe0 0 000a 0009 SATA Target
0 2 5001e67464ecffe1 1 000b 0009 SATA Target
0 3 5001e67464ecffe2 2 000c 0009 SATA Target
0 4 5001e67464ecffe3 3 000d 0009 SATA Target
0 29 5001e67464ecffe4 4 000e 0009 SATA Target
0 28 5001e67464ecffe5 5 000f 0009 SATA Target
0 27 5001e67464ecffe6 6 0010 0009 SATA Target
0 26 5001e67464ecffe7 7 0011 0009 SATA Target
0 21 5001e67464ecffe8 8 0012 0009 SATA Target
0 22 5001e67464ecffe9 9 0013 0009 SATA Target
0 23 5001e67464ecffea 10 0014 0009 SATA Target
0 12 5001e67464ecffec 12 0015 0009 SATA Target
0 13 5001e67464ecffed 13 0016 0009 SATA Target
0 14 5001e67464ecffee 14 0017 0009 SATA Target
0 15 5001e67464ecffef 15 0018 0009 SATA Target
0 16 5001e67464ecfffd 24 0019 0009 SAS Initiator and Target
Type NumPhys PhyNum Handle PhyNum Handle Port Speed
Adapter 8 0 0001 --> 23 0009 0 6.0
1 0001 --> 22 0009 0 6.0
2 0001 --> 21 0009 0 6.0
3 0001 --> 20 0009 0 6.0
4 0001 --> 19 0009 0 6.0
5 0001 --> 18 0009 0 6.0
6 0001 --> 17 0009 0 6.0
7 0001 --> 16 0009 0 6.0
Expander 26 0 0009 --> 0 000a 0 6.0
1 0009 --> 0 000b 0 6.0
2 0009 --> 0 000c 0 6.0
3 0009 --> 0 000d 0 6.0
4 0009 --> 0 000e 0 6.0
5 0009 --> 0 000f 0 6.0
6 0009 --> 0 0010 0 6.0
7 0009 --> 0 0011 0 6.0
8 0009 --> 0 0012 0 3.0
9 0009 --> 0 0013 0 3.0
10 0009 --> 0 0014 0 3.0
12 0009 --> 0 0015 0 6.0
13 0009 --> 0 0016 0 6.0
14 0009 --> 0 0017 0 6.0
15 0009 --> 0 0018 0 6.0
16 0009 --> 7 0001 0 6.0
17 0009 --> 6 0001 0 6.0
18 0009 --> 5 0001 0 6.0
19 0009 --> 4 0001 0 6.0
20 0009 --> 3 0001 0 6.0
21 0009 --> 2 0001 0 6.0
22 0009 --> 1 0001 0 6.0
23 0009 --> 0 0001 0 6.0
24 0009 --> 0 0019 0 6.0
Enclosure Handle Slots SASAddress B___T (SEP)
0001 8 500605b00140eb20
0002 25 5001e67464ecffff 0 16The dual link definitely influences my bandwidth because there are still 3 Gbps SATA drives attached. While those are transmitting/receiving, the whole link between controller and expander is basically slowed down to 3 Gbps. Well, that may not be totally correct, perhaps it only slows down a single PHY per active drive at a time. But I can prove it by benchmarks.
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I had the same questions before I bought the 36-port intel expander. I do not think link status ever shows anything other than ports 0-3 connected despite having both ports connected on my lsi 9271-8i.
Intel® RAID Expander Card RES2SV240 — RAID controller to Expander port connection information
excerpt...
Intel® RAID controller individual ports act as waterfall-type connections. If you are transferring less than 6 Gb (theoretical) from the controller to the Intel RAID Expander RES2SV240, you only use one port. Otherwise, if it is more than 6 Gb, it falls to other ports to enable the required throughput.
I don't have the equipment to max out a single port right now, so I can't validate faq info.
Intel® RAID Expander Card RES2SV240 — RAID controller to Expander port connection information
excerpt...
Intel® RAID controller individual ports act as waterfall-type connections. If you are transferring less than 6 Gb (theoretical) from the controller to the Intel RAID Expander RES2SV240, you only use one port. Otherwise, if it is more than 6 Gb, it falls to other ports to enable the required throughput.
I don't have the equipment to max out a single port right now, so I can't validate faq info.
The question is, which "port" are they talking about. They use the term "port" in terms of the 4 ports carried by a SFF-8087 and also in terms of that SFF-8087 being a port in that next paragraph. So, the waterfall of ports 0-3 taking up up to 24Gb/s, but that would mean that it would "connect" the next ports as needed. I can buy that. It would like to see it happen, and I also don't have the horsepower to pull it off. I'll just "trust in it" and go from there.
I also find it amusing that the next paragraph says 64Gb/s total on 8x8Gb/s as I think they mean 8x6Gb/s which would be 48Gb/s.
I also find it amusing that the next paragraph says 64Gb/s total on 8x8Gb/s as I think they mean 8x6Gb/s which would be 48Gb/s.
Having bought back my expander from the brink.
When I connect both SAS channels to the controller, both SAS port activity LED's light up even in light loads.
MSM says port 0-3 are connected but WebBIOS reports 7 connections with Expander SAS address, 8th has all 000000's for SAS address
When I connect both SAS channels to the controller, both SAS port activity LED's light up even in light loads.
MSM says port 0-3 are connected but WebBIOS reports 7 connections with Expander SAS address, 8th has all 000000's for SAS address