Issue with HP NC552sfp

[JMPMarshall]

I bought 3 of these on ebay a few months ago. If I'm understanding right they're rebranded Emulex OCE11102. I got one working in my NAS and another on a test bench right away but with a strange quirk. If the system I install them in has more than 8gbs of ram they will take forever to initialize if they boot at all. Unfortunately unless I can solve the problem they're worthless to me for all my other machines and given the upgrades I plan to make to my NAS it's life there is limited.

I'm interested in any ideas anyone has to get these working properly. I already updated to the latest firmware I could find (11.1.183.635) to no avail.

I just discovered the method of attempting to tape over the couple of pins and have yet to try it.

 

[Labs]

We used at work those cards in servers with 256GB RAM or more and it was no issue.
Try in the BIOS of the system you install the card to see if you have this option Enabled - "Above 4G Decoding" and if you don't use PXE disable the OPROM loading for this card if you have such option in the BIOS.

 

[JMPMarshall]

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately I'm not in a position to test this. My NAS has the bios options but I only have 8gb of ECC ram for it. The test bench (Intel DQ77mk/I3-2130) has 16gbs of ram but PXE was already disabled and I couldn't find an option to enable "Above 4G Decoding".

 

[rippiedoos]

Try this firmware: Drivers & Software - HPE Support Center.

It says it has the 14000-series firmware on it but it also has the 11000-series firmware on it. It helped me to bring down the post time from several minutes to normal timeframes. This is the UEFI-version but there is also a pure BIOS-version.

 

[BeTeP]

There is another thread discussing problems with the card.

 

[cheezehead]

These cards are a bit finicky, they can be very stable but getting the right driver/firmware combination can take some trial and error. With ESXi 6.5/6.7 I needed to run the ESXi 6.0 drivers. With FreeNAS, either the 523's or 522's stopped having driver support with the 11.2 and later builds...the work around was to run FreeNAS as a VM with VT-D'ing the HBA (could possibly recompile elsewhere and load the driver manually but I wanted to go this route).

 

[JMPMarshall]

Trying that firmware resulted in the same behavior. I finally got around to trying taping over pins 5 and 6 as outlined in the other thread. It solves the issue but I'm not exactly enthused to have tape in one of my machine's pcie slots. As such I'm going to keep on looking for some other solution. I'll keep trying different firmware versions until I hopefully find one that works.

I'm running Ubuntu Server on my NAS and I had no driver issues.

 

[JMPMarshall]

I wanted to leave an update for future users before I let this thread die.

I never did get around to trying other firmware to see if that improved the situation. I finally got around to trying the cards in my workstation and came to a realization. My workstation runs 2x8gbs of ram. My testbench and my NAS both run 2x4gb. When I put the additional 2x8gb from my HTPC into my workstation with the cards installed I have the same behaviour. Therefore the amount of ram installed doesn't matter but populating the other two slots is what causes the issue. Maybe everyone already knew it but I didn't pick up on it.