«
»

Non-HP harddrives in an HP MSA20

A customer asked me if it was possible to use non-hp drives in an HP MSA20 as they costed a lot less than HPs own drives. I honestly said that it would require a POF. The customer accepted the initial expense of single 1TB SATA drive.  I fired up hpacucli to figure out what was up and down on this

=> ctrl ch="mirror" show config detail
....
....
physicaldrive 1:1
Box: 1
Bay: 1
Status: OK
Drive Type: Data Drive
Interface Type: SATA
Size: 1000.2 GB
Firmware Revision: HPG1
Serial Number: 9QJ2B4GD
Model: HP GB1000EAFJL
SATA NCQ Capable: False

As HP does not make harddrives, but uses OEM drives with custom firmware I had to figure out what types of drives was in there. The easiest solution would be to shut the box down and pull out a drive to inspect. Having dealt with HP quite a lot, I know that they also remark the drives, so I would probably not be able to see what types of drives was in there, leaving me with guessing if I choose to go that route.

Instead I opted for figuring out what type of drive it was likely to be based on the firmware.  I googled a bit and found that the MSA20 could support up to 1TB disks. A bit more googling yielded this advisory from HP about upgrading firmware on Seagate drives to HPG6. Based on the age of the MSA20 in question, the age of the 1TB HP disks we already had in them, I decided it was most likely to be Baracuda 7200.11 drives that HP utilized for this and thus we ordered one of those.
Drive arrived. We put it in. Rescanned and lo and behold:

physicaldrive 1:6
Box: 1
Bay: 6
Status: OK
Drive Type: Data Drive
Interface Type: SATA
Size: 1000.2 GB
Firmware Revision: CC38
Serial Number:             9VP4D0ZA
Model: Seagate ST31000528AS
SATA NCQ Capable: False

A non-HP drive working. We have now placed an order for 19 x 1TB Seagate drives.

Your millage may wary if you try this. It is also worth mentioning that it would be an option to test non-seagate disks and/or bigger disks. Beware of the heat and power requirements though! HP themselves only sells the MSA20 with upto 1TB disks.

Finally for the record, it should be state that this was on an MSA20 with this firmware level:

MSA20 in mirror
 Bus Interface: SCSI
 Serial Number: PAAAC0PMQTR7V0
 Chassis Serial Number: E01RMLJ17M
 Chassis Name: mirror
 RAID 6 (ADG) Status: Enabled
 Controller Status: OK
 Chassis Slot: 2
 Hardware Revision: Rev A
 Firmware Version: 2.08
 Rebuild Priority: Medium
 Expand Priority: Medium
 Surface Scan Delay: 3 secs
 Cache Board Present: True
 Cache Status: OK
 Accelerator Ratio: 50% Read / 50% Write
 Drive Write Cache: Disabled
 Read Cache Size: 56 MB
 Write Cache Size: 56 MB
 Total Cache Size: 112 MB
 Chassis Slot 2 Battery Info
 Battery Pack Count: 2
 Battery Status: OK
 Host Bus Adapter Slot: Slot Unknown
 Host Bus Adapter Port: 1
 SATA NCQ Supported: False

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 9:22 pm and is filed under Hardware Projects, Linux, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Non-HP harddrives in an HP MSA20”

  1. Stephen Wagner says:
    August 13, 2010 at 2:17 am

    Just curious, have you done any other tweeks or tricks on this MSA20 unit?

    I’m still trying to figure out how to get the host OS to see the disks as JBOD. I’m still choked about the logical partition limit!

  2. zensonic says:
    August 13, 2010 at 6:31 am

    You can’t. At least not from the MSA20 side of things. It has a stupid limitation about logical volumes not being larger than 2TB. So you have to slice the disks into LUNs of up to 2TB in size in the MSA and combine them into a single LV on the host. Annoying to say the least.

    Personally I took another approach at the customer site. Their data means everything to them, so redundancy and raidlevels are what really matters.

    => ctrl ch=data show config

    MSA20 in data (sn: PAAACABMQUEFDA, csn: E03KMLJ18F )

    array A (SATA, Unused Space: 103320 MB)

    logicaldrive 1 (1.6 TB, RAID 6 (ADG), OK)
    logicaldrive 2 (1.6 TB, RAID 6 (ADG), OK)
    logicaldrive 3 (1.6 TB, RAID 6 (ADG), OK)
    logicaldrive 4 (1.6 TB, RAID 6 (ADG), OK)
    logicaldrive 5 (1.6 TB, RAID 6 (ADG), OK)

    physicaldrive 1:1 (box 1:bay 1, SATA, 1000.2 GB, OK)
    physicaldrive 1:2 (box 1:bay 2, SATA, 1000.2 GB, OK)
    physicaldrive 1:3 (box 1:bay 3, SATA, 1000.2 GB, OK)
    physicaldrive 1:4 (box 1:bay 4, SATA, 1000.2 GB, OK)
    physicaldrive 1:5 (box 1:bay 5, SATA, 1000.2 GB, OK)
    physicaldrive 1:6 (box 1:bay 6, SATA, 1000.2 GB, OK)
    physicaldrive 1:7 (box 1:bay 7, SATA, 1000.2 GB, OK)
    physicaldrive 1:8 (box 1:bay 8, SATA, 1000.2 GB, OK)
    physicaldrive 1:9 (box 1:bay 9, SATA, 1000.2 GB, OK)
    physicaldrive 1:10 (box 1:bay 10, SATA, 1000.2 GB, OK)
    physicaldrive 1:11 (box 1:bay 11, SATA, 1000.2 GB, OK)
    physicaldrive 1:12 (box 1:bay 12, SATA, 1000.2 GB, OK, spare)

    So raid-6, with a spare, that is 3 disks out of 12 is for redundancy purposes. The last 9 disks are sliced into 1.6TB LUNs and presented to the host. On the host side I use LVM to combine it directly. In a JBOD setup, it would use the md driver in linux. In my end:

    Finding volume group “alt”
    — Volume group —
    VG Name alt
    System ID
    Format lvm2
    Metadata Areas 5
    Metadata Sequence No 6
    VG Access read/write
    VG Status resizable
    MAX LV 0
    Cur LV 3
    Open LV 3
    Max PV 0
    Cur PV 5
    Act PV 5
    VG Size 8,11 TB
    PE Size 4,00 MB
    Total PE 2125000
    Alloc PE / Size 2073800 / 7,91 TB
    Free PE / Size 51200 / 200,00 GB
    VG UUID HChKy6-EKi7-uRzo-pFOi-uI9c-Qxn7-aAXJbU

    — Logical volume —
    LV Name /dev/alt/data
    VG Name alt
    LV UUID 9aeh2b-JG95-aA1F-SL35-iTlr-4ZUZ-k9yn3c
    LV Write Access read/write
    LV Status available
    # open 1
    LV Size 2,00 TB
    Current LE 524288
    Segments 2
    Allocation inherit
    Read ahead sectors 0
    Block device 253:0

    — Logical volume —
    LV Name /dev/alt/permanent_to_tape
    VG Name alt
    LV UUID BW3WMN-27Lu-GGH5-2Cox-eJuQ-rpQT-E8jYEc
    LV Write Access read/write
    LV Status available
    # open 1
    LV Size 200,00 GB
    Current LE 51200
    Segments 1
    Allocation inherit
    Read ahead sectors 0
    Block device 253:1

    — Logical volume —
    LV Name /dev/alt/home
    VG Name alt
    LV UUID F8m989-K1UI-ypiA-TLa8-T9nK-kl21-reLhlP
    LV Write Access read/write
    LV Status available
    # open 1
    LV Size 5,72 TB
    Current LE 1498312
    Segments 4
    Allocation inherit
    Read ahead sectors 0
    Block device 253:2

    — Physical volumes —
    PV Name /dev/cciss/c0d5
    PV UUID eMkVxm-A792-ccvU-T8Kh-XfpB-yLEL-ZNZuPu
    PV Status allocatable
    Total PE / Free PE 425000 / 0

    PV Name /dev/cciss/c0d6
    PV UUID qMFPjc-CQBf-tYa3-DeOF-1Q8m-5f0B-nZmRUf
    PV Status allocatable
    Total PE / Free PE 425000 / 51200

    PV Name /dev/cciss/c0d7
    PV UUID ImjS25-M24u-o0pK-2Uss-2YMm-2RjY-xl5V4s
    PV Status allocatable
    Total PE / Free PE 425000 / 0

    PV Name /dev/cciss/c0d8
    PV UUID bn9k8V-1ZVu-YvzT-B65R-UhzN-Hj8k-sKvwyQ
    PV Status allocatable
    Total PE / Free PE 425000 / 0

    PV Name /dev/cciss/c0d9
    PV UUID vwCnyZ-qZ3G-sERD-mKr5-zFwP-SbNo-SHC6hY
    PV Status allocatable
    Total PE / Free PE 425000 / 0

    Hope you got some ideas on how to proceed. The short answer: the MSA20 is limited. You have to work around a 2TB LV limit. But hey, it is cheap storage ;-)

Leave a Reply