Controlling HP D2700 Storrage

[mickey_zg]

Hello everyone.
Recently I purchased the HP D2700 Disc Enclosure, which has 12x 2.5" 1TB WD Red disks (of 25). FreeNAS 11.2 is installed on the HP DL360 G7, which has an additional P812 SAS controller and is connected to the D2700 trough external miniSAS cables, and everything works great. Is there any way to controll D2700 Discs and Arrays via FreeNAS (eg adding new Discs or managing Arrays) without restarting the FreeNAS machine and doing this trough HP ACU?
I'm new to FreeNAS, and I'm not very familiar with it.

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

You should use an LSI 9207-8e with that enclosure. Hardware RAID and FreeNAS are not a good combination. Handling the disks is what ZFS was designed to do. You should be able to find one of those on eBay for ~= $50. I can assure you it works. I have two systems driving a D2700 and a D2600 with that card.

 

[mickey_zg]

Thanx, will try :)

 

[konetzed]

Does the HP D2700 work fine with sata ssd drive hooked up to the LSI 9207-8e? Thanks in advance.

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

Does the HP D2700 work fine with sata ssd drive hooked up to the LSI 9207-8e? Thanks in advance.

I would imagine so, but I have not tried that specific combination.

 

[mickey_zg]

Does the HP D2700 work fine with sata ssd drive hooked up to the LSI 9207-8e? Thanks in advance.

so far i haven't any issues with the SATA SSD. Have two Crucial MX500 - 1TB SSD in D2700, and they work fine

 

[SamM]

I tried the HP D2700 SFF enclosure with pairs of SAS 9207-4i4e & SAS 9217-4i4e HBA's and seven Crucial MX500 1Tb SSD's. My experience is:

1. During POST, if you go into the BIOS of he HBA, it shows that the drives are capable of a 6G link, but they will only link at 3G.
   1. Playing with the SAS2Flsh and similar DOS utilities, it *APPEARS* that the HBA is communicating with the enclosure at 6G, but that the enclosure is communicating with the drives at 3G. This was my biggest issue and I was never able to resolve it. I hear/assumed it's a Vendor Lock-in thing, and am wondering if the 3700 successor has the same issue or not.
2. I've connected one of the enclosures uplink to one 9207 or 9217, and the other to another 9207 or 9217 respectively within the same server in order to gain path/HBA redundancy. Which drives are being handled by which controller seems to depend on which utility you ask and when...
   1. In this config, all drives appear to take a active/standby or link failover (as opposed to active/active or load balancing on both links) connection to the SAS switches and uplink HBA's.
3. I've tried a single 9207-8e with both enclosure controllers plugged into the same HBA. The enclosure *APPEARS* to make an active/standby connection to the HBA. Even though both cables and ports (on the HBA) are used, only one seems active at a time. That's fine for redundancy, but an unnecessary waste of bandwidth since the other channel effectively goes unutilized.
4. There's a separate issue with using Crucial MX500 SSD's (apparently all form factors are affected), they generate false-positive unreadable/pending error messages.
   1. See: https://www.ixsystems.com/community...dable-pending-sectors-mean.64309/#post-534836
   2. These warnings have been confirmed as false positives, but they're still annoying to see. It's the 'Boy who cried "Wolf!"' thing. It's currently said to be a firmware issue, and Crucial as no apparent interest in addressing said issue.