4+4... 2x4... and other 8TB algebra


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Can't check the 4+4 configuration right now, because Areca card still needs firmware update (from current 1.39 to 1.49) to understand drives > 2.2TB.

 

The CLI method of updating firmware is very easy.

 

Download the zip file of 1.49 firmware updates from the Areca website.

Unzip the 4 files to your flash.

 

Download the CLI program from the Areca website.

Unzip the proper version to your flash (mine came with a both a cli32 and a cli64). If using a 6.0 beta, use cli64. If 5.0.x, use cli32.

 

Run cli64. (e.g., /boot/cli64).

 

From the CLI> prompt, run (assuming you put the firmware files on the root of your flash):

sys updatefw path=/boot/ARCxxxxBIOS.BIN

sys updatefw path=/boot/ARCxxxxBOOT.BIN

sys updatefw path=/boot/ARCxxxxFIRM.BIN

sys updatefw path=/boot/ARCxxxxMBR0.BIN

 

Afterwards, I recommend shutting down the server completely (so it powers down), and even unplugging the server for 15 seconds (some motherboards maintain power to some of the slots, and you want the card to loose power). Then boot back up. (This may not all be necessary, but neither will it hurt anything. It is a good precaution when updating firmware to make sure that no remnants of the old firmware are still being used).

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Next: "on-drive" Addonics AD2HDDHP6G HPM (Hardware Port Multiplier), JMicron chipset, $33 at Addonics.

 

This is tiny 2-port card, mounted directly on SATA hard drive connector, so it does not occupy motherboard expansion slot. Card can do RAID-0, RAID-1, JBOD, and LARGE, mode is set by jumpers. In addition to brilliantly designed form factor, these little wonders can be daisy-chained.

 

Testing was done aiming to 4+4TB=8TB parity.

 

Created volume is seen by BIOS and unRAID under name JMicron_H_W_RAID0_blahblah for RAID0, and JMicron_H_W_JBOD_blahblah for both JBOD and LARGE (!).

 

Test 1:

4+4TB RAID-0 via Addonics AD2HDDHP6G 2-port on-drive, 8TB Archive as data via mobo ===> unRAID says: Disk in parity slot is not biggest. unRAID reported parity User Capacity: 8,001,456,963,584 bytes [8.00 TB], data (8TB Archive) User Capacity: 8,001,563,222,016 bytes [8.00 TB]. Free-falling sync speed ~225-220 MB/s.

 

So, in RAID-0 the card silently does size truncation and there is no way to disable it.  :(

 

Test 2:

4+4TB LARGE (spanned) via Addonics AD2HDDHP6G 2-port on-drive, 8TB Archive as data via mobo ===> unRAID says: Disk in parity slot is not biggest.

 

unRAID reported parity User Capacity: 8,001,456,963,584 bytes [8.00 TB] so the card does size truncation in the LARGE mode, too. :( Not clear why, but it does it. Free-falling sync speed ~185-180 MB/s. Lower free-falling speed proves that it is in fact LARGE and not RAID-0.

 

Note, that this card is very reluctant to change mode from RAID-0 to LARGE, it kinda gets stuck in previous config. You might need to set it to JBOD first, then to LARGE. Couple of extra reboots also might be needed.

 

Test 3:

4+4TB JBOD (individual disks) via Addonics AD2HDDHP6G 2-port on-drive ===> unRAID sees only one 4TB disk.

 

Probably my (rather old) motherboard SATA ports are not port multiplier compatible, Addonics manual says it's needed (the PM-compatibility, I mean). No speed tests were done.

 

Test 4:

4TB+4TB+160GB LARGE via 2 x Addonics AD2HDDHP6G daisy chained, 8TB Archive as data via mobo ===> unRAID accepted the 8.16 TB parity!  ;D

 

I'm not going to test the parity sync speed in this particular configuration, I'm happy enough that with daisy-chaining of these little cards I can mix and match practically any HDDs to achieve virtually any "single" drive size.

 

 

 

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That's really good news ... AND really BAD news about that slick little adapter.

 

It's VERY disappointing that it won't create a RAID-0 without a bit of truncation.  It seemed like a near "perfect" way to create an 8TB parity drive from a pair of 4TB units.    But it's neat how well it works ... and that you can daisy chain them.

 

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pkn => Did you by chance look in the BIOS for the Addonics card to see if there's any option about whether or not to truncate the drives?  ...

Confirming: the Addonics AD4SA6GPX2 BIOS has no option to disable size truncation. In fact, the only option available in configuring RAID is to chose between 64k and 32k of stripe size  >:(

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...

Run cli64. (e.g., /boot/cli64).

 

From the CLI> prompt, run (assuming you put the firmware files on the root of your flash):

sys updatefw path=/boot/ARCxxxxBIOS.BIN

...

"The current version of firmware does not support this function. Please update firmware using web-based manager."  :(

 

So... I need to start archttp64 first... and then how do I connect to it? Is it just port 81, like http://my-server-ip:81 ? Yes it is

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Does your board have a dedicated RJ45 LAN port? Maybe that's what it is referring to. You can update the firmware easily that way.

No RJ45 on card. But I've started archttp64 and connected to it from browser http://my-server-ip:81 successfully.

 

Now it wants login/password to access the card configuration per se (at http://my-server-ip:82 ). One site mentions Official form Areca's FAQ "admin/0000" - don't work  :(

 

So I'm googling for Areca cards default login/password... and what to do if it was set by previous owner to not default...

 

MASTER PASSWORD: MNO974315743924 - does not work either (it's probably for McBIOS anyway)

 

Entered McBIOS - it's a fancy name for Areca card BIOS setup, during boot - there is an option "Change password". Entered empty password twice, which triggered question "Disable password?" answered "Yes"... and still can not reach http://my-server-ip:82 - it still asks for login/password and does not accept "admin/0000"

 

I'll leave Areca firmware update for later.

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I often wonder why cards like this bother with passwords => I suspect they cause far more problems than they prevent.

Well, since it's remote management, authentication is a must.

 

Agree ... I'd forgotten this was designed to allow remote logins.  You indeed don't want some teenage hacker to reset your corporate RAID setup !!  :)

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... It's VERY disappointing that it won't create a RAID-0 without a bit of truncation.  It seemed like a near "perfect" way to create an 8TB parity drive from a pair of 4TB units. ...

Yeah, that would be really sweet... no motherboard slot needed, complete or almost complete motherboard independence... Maybe we can ask Addonics to remove the truncation?

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... It's VERY disappointing that it won't create a RAID-0 without a bit of truncation.  It seemed like a near "perfect" way to create an 8TB parity drive from a pair of 4TB units. ...

Yeah, that would be really sweet... no motherboard slot needed, complete or almost complete motherboard independence... Maybe we can ask Addonics to remove the truncation?

Creating a small HPA on the 8T drives is not the end of the world.

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Agree about HPA - if a drive is empty then one simple command and full power down of the drive and you are ready to go :)

i just studied a bit about my Raid controller Dell H710P - there are option called Coercion Mode - default value 128M for my controller - an amount of "truncation" meant in previous posts (LSI recommends change this to 1G). i can set this amount to zero too but still have no mind if this helps..

For example - i have 2TB drive attached and look at the drive info from controller:

 

Raw Size: 1.819 TB [0xe8e088b0 Sectors]

Non Coerced Size: 1.818 TB [0xe8d088b0 Sectors]

Coerced Size: 1.818 TB [0xe8d00000 Sectors]

 

if i multiply sector count(it's in Hex in above example) of Non Coerced Size by 2 as with Raid0, then Sector count are still under 4TB drive sector count..

 

so, it all depends - different controllers have different approaches :)

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Very interesting.  The raw size shows E8E...  => but the "non coerced" size shows E8D...  ==> Is that a typo on your part, or are they different?    The "standard" (at least it's consistent among all the drives I've actually looked at) size for a 2TB drive is 2,000,396,742,656 bytes, which is E8E077F8 sectors in hex.    Interestingly, your raw size is larger than this; but your coerced size is smaller.

 

The "coerced" size is clearly just a round-down (truncation) to a fixed size, but it's interesting that your non-coerced size is still smaller than 2GB.  What make/model disk drive are you using?

 

 

 

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RAID controllers do this to ensure that replacement drives will work. In any true RAID configuration (RAID0 not being true RAID as nothing is redundant), you should not disable this. This saves them the trouble of worrying about things like HPA and differing manufacturer specs.

 

 

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Yes, Raw and Non coerced sizes are different - i copy/pasted those three lines from LSI Megacli..

and used drives are 2x Seagate Desktop HDD ST2000DM001 - Hard drive - 2 TB - internal - 3.5" - SATA 6Gb/s - 7200 rpm - buffer: 64 MB

 

i have 2x1TB Seagates (Seagate SV35 Series ST1000VX000 - Hard drive - 1 TB - internal - 3.5" - SATA 6Gb/s - 7200 rpm - buffer: 64 MB) attached to this controller too, so there are another example:

 

Raw Size: 931.512 GB [0x74706db0 Sectors]

Non Coerced Size: 931.012 GB [0x74606db0 Sectors]

Coerced Size: 931.0 GB [0x74600000 Sectors]

 

i use these 4 drives for my Unraid - 2x2TB Raid0 for parity and 2x1TB Raid1 for cache drive  ;)

 

Edit: updated 2TB drive specs..

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RAID controllers do this to ensure that replacement drives will work. In any true RAID configuration (RAID0 not being true RAID as nothing is redundant), you should not disable this. This saves them the trouble of worrying about things like HPA and differing manufacturer specs.

 

Actually RAID0 is a "true" RAID configuration ... it's simply not redundant  :)

... and you should still use the "coerced" size with that, as most controllers require that the component disks be the same size for this mode as well.

 

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Updated the Addonics AD2HDDHP6G tests post:

 

Update 2015/03/23: I have strong suspicion that this test was actually performed with RAID-0 configuration rather than LARGE. There is something strange going on with changing settings on this card - it seems to stuck to previous configuration sometimes. And when it does, it's a big pain in the neck to unstuck it... I'm still investigating. It seems that the motherboard BIOS is involved somehow, and maybe even unRAID itself, although I can not imagine how the latter might happen...

 

Question: can this "stucking" be ACPI related/induced?

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... it seems to stuck to previous configuration sometimes ...

 

Are you changing the "Set Enable" jumper before you change the configuration jumpers?    The manual shows you have to ground the Set Enable jumper before the card will accept any changes to the configuration.    The process would seem to be:  (a) with power off, configure the Set Enable jumper to the set mode and then configure the configuration jumpers as desired;  (b)  power on so the card reads the current config and sets it;  © power off and change the Set Enable jumper so the config will be retained; and then you're ready to use it.

 

 

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... it seems to stuck to previous configuration sometimes ...

 

Are you changing the "Set Enable" jumper before you change the configuration jumpers?    The manual shows you have to ground the Set Enable jumper before the card will accept any changes to the configuration.    The process would seem to be:  (a) with power off, configure the Set Enable jumper to the set mode and then configure the configuration jumpers as desired;  (b)  power on so the card reads the current config and sets it;  © power off and change the Set Enable jumper so the config will be retained; and then you're ready to use it.

I'm not doing the whole nine yards, I simply keep the "Set Enable" on SET+GND all the time. Manual says "after setting RAID mode Set Enable may be moved to SET+NC to preserve the setting". May be moved, may be not :) To be exact, I've tried the all-steps way couple of times, found no difference.

 

This seemed to work going from RAID-0 to JBOD (see tests post, the tests were done in order listed), and, I just confirmed, it works going from JBOD to LARGE (with two different disks).

 

But when I, keeping jumpers in LARGE, changed disks to two identical, I've got JBOD and SMART status "Bad".

 

So I set jumpers to JBOD, rebooted (seemed Ok), changed jumpers to LARGE - and got JBOD again! What worked ten minutes ago with two different disks, does not work with two identical.

 

Looks like the card just does not want to do LARGE with two identical disks - only RAID-0 or JBOD. Or LARGE - but with different disks...

 

Anyway, I'll leave this little stubborn !@#$% for now - I've got delivered the on-bracket 5+1-port SYBA SY-PCI40037 (which turned out to be IOCREST - are they blind or what?) so I'll play with that. Stay tuned!  :D

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Ha! Rebooted with Addonics AD2HDDHP6G (the on-drive thingy) one more time, just for luck, and it finally agreed to do LARGE on two identical 4TB disks!  ;D Unfortunately, the size truncation still there even in LARGE mode.  >:(

 

Doing "free falling speed" test now, to verify it is in fact LARGE and not RAID-0.

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