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Hey Gerbils,

Quick background, I am running an HP DL380 G5, with all 8 SAS hot swap drive bays filled, and the full size PCIe slot occupied with two 480GB SSD's using a Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro.

A customer called and now I need to upgrade the storage because I need to add around 1TB of storage to this already packed beast. Throughput isn't a high priority, as it'll be storing media files as a download repository.

The way I see it, I have "two" options.. one I find a half height PCIe m.2 adapter (do these exist?) and a 1TB m.2 SSD
-or-
I can replace a 72GB 15K SAS drive with a 1 or 2TB drive. I know a laptop SATA drives will "work" in a SAS interface, albeit at half IO rates and SMART is absent; which this is a remotely managed server, so I need all the reporting I can get with the health of this machine.
Absolute worst case is install a half height USB3 interface and buy a USB3 external HDD.. although I'd like to not have to place a brick on top of a rack cabinet.
My question, any one have any storage solution recommendations?

So far, I've found in the 2.5" SAS form factor the Seagate Constellation.2 ... and the Constellation ES. Although, sourcing these seems to be spotty.

Thanks everyone for your advice and your input.

Is there rackspace for another 2U chassis?

Search ebay for an old HP DAS and gain up to 12x 3.5" bays. If the DL380 G5 doesn't have an onboard HBA, you only need a half-height PCIe or PCI-X slot.

I manage a mostly Dell server environment but HP have something to match Dell in almost every category. If your HP is discontinued, then expect corporate cast-offs to be flooding ebay for a pitance.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R4 ... 0&_sacat=0

chubbyhorse wrote:

I can replace a 72GB 15K SAS drive with a 1 or 2TB drive. I know a laptop SATA drives will "work" in a SAS interface, albeit at half IO rates and SMART is absent; which this is a remotely managed server, so I need all the reporting I can get with the health of this machine.

Are you sure about the "no SMART" part? We have SATA drives attached to SAS controllers where I work, and we are able to pull SMART data.

just brew it! wrote:

chubbyhorse wrote:

I can replace a 72GB 15K SAS drive with a 1 or 2TB drive. I know a laptop SATA drives will "work" in a SAS interface, albeit at half IO rates and SMART is absent; which this is a remotely managed server, so I need all the reporting I can get with the health of this machine.

Are you sure about the "no SMART" part? We have SATA drives attached to SAS controllers where I work, and we are able to pull SMART data.

I agree with just brew it!. A SAS controller should be capable of supporting all SATA features, including SMART.

Oh I didn't think about getting the storage box; I'll have to call the data center tomorrow.

As far as the smart attributes getting passed, it has the HP P410 SAS RAID controller and earlier I put a Samsung ssd into one of the bays and ran smartctl and it couldn't obtain the smart stats. Just came up blank however I could poll the SAS Raid array just fine. Could be an OS limitation (openSuSE 42.1). Plus I could not pass trim commands through the controller either.

I would look into the HP D2600 or D2700 (I think D2700 is the 2.5" drives, the D2600 is the 3.5" drives) if you want an external enclosure. You can get an MSA60 really cheap (MSA60 is 3.5", MSA70 is 2.5"?) but it is EOL and you may play lottery with the SAS backplane as far as what firmware you can upgrade to. Plus, it's a little esoteric on HOW to upgrade the SAS backplane firmware--if memory serves you have to manually download the firmware and pop it on to HPSUM 8.0 and get into a command line after loading it to manually run it. Probably you can run it directly from some Linux; I'm more a Windows guy.

The P410 doesn't have any external SAS ports, so you'll be looking at getting a P812 replacement. I run a couple of HP DL380 G5s and max the cache on the RAID controllers when I can. Heck, one uses 8 x 256 GB Samsung 840 Pro SSDs. My testing on this can be found here: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=86757

I am actually needing to replace the MSA60 with a D2600 so it stays under active support from HP.

For SMART, I haven't tested this myself, but this may work?

http://www.hdsentinel.com/revision460.php

* added support for HP Smart Array RAID controllers: detecting and reporting error counters, temperature and health status, possible changes/degradations, SSD wearout provided by the RAID controller for SATA / SAS hard disks, SSDs.
Tested with HP Smart Array E200, P400, P410, P420 and embedded B120i controllers.

chubbyhorse wrote:

The way I see it, I have "two" options.. one I find a half height PCIe m.2 adapter (do these exist?) and a 1TB m.2 SSD

Yes they do. https://www.amazon.com/Lycom-DT-120-PCI ... B00MYCQP38

Yeah, I know the MSA60 is EOL .. but if one wants to be technical, so is the DL380 G5.. So I'm not absolutely against older hardware; it generally seems pretty reliable once you enter the enterprise grade equipment.

Scrotos wrote:

The P410 doesn't have any external SAS ports, so you'll be looking at getting a P812 replacement.

..and it doesn't look like the P812 has any internal x4 internal connectors either... or were you thinking of adding the P812 into the system alongside the P400?
I would most likely look into the P800 if I went with the D2600.

Granted, I still need to call the data-center and verify they can accommodate an additional 2U in the rack which will ultimately determine the best course of action.
Providing that option is available; and given the options, is there another preferred route you'd pursue? I sometimes get tunnel vision and don't consider all the options.
(Case in point of getting an HP StorageWorks enclosure)

Regarding the P812, looking at the picture here, I see two internal connectors and 4 external:

http://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/pub ... -c02019041

HP (HPE) has jacked up all their quickspecs links so instead I offer you a better picture and a bad price at CDW:

https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/HPE-S ... 06350.aspx

(under technical specs it also lists the internal and external interfaces)

I see them as cheap as $50 from online vendors. I actually have some of these but I'm not onsite and am too lazy to open the cases to look.

Also regarding the EOL stuff, I know the G5 is "old" and all that jazz, but I don't consider it EOL until HP won't let me renew a support contract on it. ;D

If you need to stick with 2U maximum, you can get a relatively cheap DL380 G6 and spec it out with a second drive cage which gets you 16 bays of DAS at the cost of the built-in laptop-style DVD-ROM drive. eSISO has an eBay store and I think I've gotten stuff configured from them before and it's worked out well at a decent price. You can contact them and they can make a custom hidden eBay listing just for you with the stuff you specifically configure.

I actually have a DL380 G6 with P812 with 16 internal bays that also connects to an MSA60 via redundant SAS links. I had to keep the existing P410i because I needed 4 internal ports for the 16 internal bays so those bays all run off of the P410i, the MSA60 off of the P812. The MSA60, I lost the SAS backplane lottery with that so had to buy new backplanes from HP PartSurfer so I could upgrade them to the latest firmware. I am unsure if HP PartSurfer even has replacement backplanes anymore.

The other advantage of stepping up to a G6 is that as of now, HPSUM still supports the G6. I think G5 hit EOL for updates last year so the newer HPSUMs don't run on it or don't offer anything new for it. There was some drama upgrading the G6/G7 SAS backplane firmware with two backplanes installed but I believe the latest revision (D?) resolved those issues. Either way, there's a workaround of just having one backplane at a time installed when you do that particular (and rarely updated) firmware update.

I run a mix of G5 up to G7 and am even working on bringing up some DL2000 nodes for XenServer over 10Gb SAN. That's still a work in progress, though.