New HighPoint Data Center 7280 32-Channel Host Adapter

[mrjofus1959]

I'm starting this thread in anticipation of posting results on whether or not it works tonight, but here goes...

 

I just received my new DC7280 HBA that I'm going to use for my WHSv1 setup that's going to transition to unRAID.  I've already understandably been warned that it may not work with unRAID, but here's hoping...

 

What I know as of right now is that the board uses 8 Marvell 88SM4140 port multipliers that control the 32 SATA ports the HBA supports.  The on-board host controller is of course covered by a heatsink so I don't have that device part number available.  But in Googling the 88SM4140 it would appear they would be attached to a Marvell 88SX60xx SATA 8-port controller chip (http://www.marvell.com/company/news/pressDetail.do?releaseID=409).  Whatever that translates to???

 

I will be installing and trying the board tonight and once I do I'll post back here with the results.

 

QUICK EDIT:  In looking at Marvell's product selector they have exactly one device, the 88SE9480, that is a PCIe 2.0 x8 to SAS/SATA controller with 8 ports.  Since the DC7280 is a PCIe 2.0 x8 HBA I would have to believe that this is the actual chip being used to drive the 8 88SM4140 PM devices.  Hopefully I'll get confirmation from HighPoint's web tech support.

[mrjofus1959]

Well crap!  No joy here!  I installed my new HBA with my one data disk attached, booted unRAID and voila!, nothing!  unRAID is not recognizing the card in my system.  Just to make sure it's not the card I shutdown the system, removed the USB flash, set aside my unRAID data HDD, reattached my WHSv1 boot disk and restarted the system.  WHSv1 starts up just fine, and after installing the driver for the new HBA I hotplugged a couple of blank HDDs and they were immediately recognized by the system and the WHS console.  I added them as data drives and did some minimal file copying and everything seems fine.

 

So I have the Linux open source drivers on a CD that came with the card.  If only I knew what to do with them...

[prostuff1]

Well crap!  No joy here!  I installed my new HBA with my one data disk attached, booted unRAID and voila!, nothing!  unRAID is not recognizing the card in my system.  Just to make sure it's not the card I shutdown the system, removed the USB flash, set aside my unRAID data HDD, reattached my WHSv1 boot disk and restarted the system.  WHSv1 starts up just fine, and after installing the driver for the new HBA I hotplugged a couple of blank HDDs and they were immediately recognized by the system and the WHS console.  I added them as data drives and did some minimal file copying and everything seems fine.

 

So I have the Linux open source drivers on a CD that came with the card.  If only I knew what to do with them...

Unfortunately, I kind of saw this coming.  If you cold post a syslog with the system booted into unRAID then we can see what is going on.  Do some searching on the interwebs to see hat driver this card might use in linux and maybe Lime-Tech can enable it in the kernel.

[mrjofus1959]

Unfortunately, I kind of saw this coming.  If you cold post a syslog with the system booted into unRAID then we can see what is going on.  Do some searching on the interwebs to see hat driver this card might use in linux and maybe Lime-Tech can enable it in the kernel.

 

I'll gather a syslog later this evening.  In the mean time would it be acceptable for me to post the gzip'd tar file of the card's linux drivers here?  EDIT:  I guess the file size could be a problem since it's 544KB.

[mrjofus1959]

Unfortunately, I kind of saw this coming.  If you cold post a syslog with the system booted into unRAID then we can see what is going on.  Do some searching on the interwebs to see hat driver this card might use in linux and maybe Lime-Tech can enable it in the kernel.

 

I've attached the syslog from a fresh boot.  Not being much of a linux user I can't see anything in there that tells me anything. 

syslog-2011-09-14.txt

[Johnm]

what version of unraid did you try?

 

You might some better driver support in 12a

 

[mrjofus1959]

what version of unraid did you try?

 

You might some better driver support in 12a

 

 

I'm using 4.7 since I'm brand new to this and thought I should stay away from the latest and greatest.  But just for kicks I will try 12a shortly.

 

UPDATE:  I just tried 12a (very quickly) but that doesn't seem to work either.  I'll spend some more time with that tomorrow.

[jimwhite]

... and maybe post the 12a syslog.... 

[mbryanr]

http://www.highpoint-tech.cn/BIOS_Driver/DC7280/linux/dc7280-linux-src-v1.0-110513-1646.tar.gz

[mrjofus1959]

http://www.highpoint-tech.cn/BIOS_Driver/DC7280/linux/dc7280-linux-src-v1.0-110513-1646.tar.gz

 

Thanks for the link.  I do have that tar file, but is there anything I can try with it on my own?  Sorry to be fairly linux sysadmin illiterate.

[mrjofus1959]

... and maybe post the 12a syslog.... 

 

Here's the 12a syslog.  Thanks.

syslog-2011-09-15.txt

[mbryanr]

If the driver is not in the kernel...then you'd have to roll your own or ask Tom to add the driver.

[mrjofus1959]

If the driver is not in the kernel...then you'd have to roll your own or ask Tom to add the driver.

 

Any good guides here for rolling my own?  I'd be happy to give it a shot just to be able to try this new HBA and be able to report back on if it works and how well it works.  Thanks.

[mbryanr]

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Building_a_custom_kernel

 

and the readme file from the Highpoint .tgz

README.txt

[mrjofus1959]

Thanks. I'll give it a try.

[siamsquare]

Yo,

 

Would like to see this card work inside Unraid and see a benchmark for file transfer.

Would be overkill for a norco-4224 but it comes at a reasonable price.

Too bad it's only Sata-300!

 

gr33tz

[mrjofus1959]

Yo,

 

Would like to see this card work inside Unraid and see a benchmark for file transfer.

Would be overkill for a norco-4224 but it comes at a reasonable price.

Too bad it's only Sata-300!

 

gr33tz

 

Agree on the 3Gbps though once I've got my server up and running that's not going to impact media streaming.  Those 4140 port multipliers are the gating item since it appears the controller chip is 6Gbps.  I'm going to attempt a custom kernel with the drivers installed.  Stay tuned - I don't really know what I'm doing! 

[Johnm]

This looks like an interesting, cost effective card to fill a Norco RPC-4224 with a single controller.

 

While I have no plans to purchase this card any time in the future (assuming it works), it would be nice to know we are not locked into a limited selection of HBA's.

 

If this card had ESXi support, then it would become even more attractive to a much larger group of people.

 

I was sort of afraid you were going to be doomed or at least jump a few hurdles testing this, but i still have my fingers crossed for you. That is usually the issue with cutting edge tech. you have to bleed a little to get it to play nice.

 

I know you said in the other thread that you chose this card because you were limited to a single PCIx slot.

 

for about the same price (or less), there is another option to 24 drives in a single PCIe.

 

you can pick up a cheap expander aware HBA (IBM M1050 for example is $80 on ebay) and an Intel RES2SV240 24 port Expander.

The RES2SV240 can work with a molex power plug instead of a PCI slot.

 

The above solution does work in unRAID and/or ESXi.

 

something to consider if your quest for the 7280 fails.

 

also, it might be worth shooting tom and email. he might offer some advice on getting that 7280 up and running.

[mrjofus1959]

Well I finally had some success last night compiling a new kernel module in unRAID for my HighPoint controller.  I followed the unRAID wiki by olympia that’s linked in the first post in this forum link:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=14129.0

 

I followed the instructions exactly down through “make menuconfig” under “Configure and Compile the new Kernel”, but once in menuconfig I just backed immediately out since I didn’t need those features.

 

At that point I followed the instructions for building my kernel module that came with the open source driver I got from HighPoint, which was nothing more than a “make” and “make install”

 

I jumped down to the “make bzImage” line and continued down to “Installing Tvheadend” where I then jumped to “Switch to new bzimage and bzroot files” and finished the process.

 

Much to my surprise when I rebooted I was able to see the new SATA controller and the NTFS disks that were attached (from WHSv1).  I was able to mount the NTFS partitions as read-only using unmenu disk management, and then I could see the data on those disks over the network.  From there I ran into some issues with moving my single unRAID drive from the mobo SATA connector to the new controller, but I’ll work on that later.

 

At any rate this seems to have worked so far.  I did all of this from within a telnet session to my unRAID 4.7 server.

 

UPDATE:  I just posted a step-by-step guide here:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=15391.0

[mrjofus1959]

OK, so given some sage advice on this forum and taking into account the many hours of time I've spent working on this DC7280 card, I'm conceding defeat to the HPT.  (This is partially due to their apparently horrific tech support by the way.)

 

So I'm going to switch motherboards to a Biostar TH67B (yes I know it has THAT NIC, but so does my ASUS and it's fine) and get 2 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards.  The mobo has 6 SATA ports, 2 of which are 6Gbps which should be great for parity and cache drives.  So I'll have a total of 20 SATA ports and by all accounts on this forum those Supermicro controllers will be the ticket.

 

All in all I feel like I learned a bit about compiling drivers, but I've got to move on and get my server back up and running!

 

Thanks to all for feedback on the HPT DC7280!

[WeeboTech]

I think you will be better off this way.

[Johnm]

At least you tried.

 

It was not the end of the story the way I hoped it would. But I can't say I didn't think it would end this way.

 

Chalk it up to a learning experience.

[WeeboTech]

Yes, good attempt. In the end though, going with the most common products makes it easier, to start and if you have to replace something.

[Guest]

@mrjofus1959

 

Did You just gave up according to the HighPoint Support or did the controller cause trouble?

 

As I understood it so far I thought, that after the selfcompiled kernel, the Controller would do his job.

 

cu