SOLVED H220 or H240 HBA?

[Strange Rover]

I have an HP DL380e G8 that did have an H220 HBA card but that card has failed and I was wondering if I could use an H240 HBA instead as I can get it cheaper. Any pros or cons to look out for with the H240?

My system has 12 8tb SATA HDDs and 2 240GB SATA SSDs for the boot pool although I've noticed the with the H220 having to select the boot disk and the optional alternative boot disk TrueNAS comes up with an error upon boot but boots up fine.

 

[fullbodydenim]

The HP H240 HBA does not use an LSI controller chip AFAIK it is a MicroSemi / PMCC / Adaptec based chipset. I have seen some other posters who have claimed to get it working in FreeNAS / TrueNAS Core but with issues regarding SMART data not passing through and the fact that it uses the CISS driver which I guess isn't as reliable as the LSI mps driver. I am in the market as well for a HBA and this is what I have read. I would recommend you get another H220 if you just want to restore your array and not have to deal with a headache.

 

[Strange Rover]

Thanks, that is the same rough info I'd found after posting on here. I also found some info suggesting the H240 gives slower transfer speed for some reason but I can't vouch for that.

Another H220 is on order for the machine.

 

[jgreco]

You'd be much better off with a proper LSI HBA. This article was written for people in your situation:

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

Please note that we're specifically looking for an LSI HBA with specific firmware. Most other stuff tends to fall apart in the most tragic of manners at some point.

 

[Strange Rover]

Sorry for taking a time to reply but life got in the way. I've now gone for an LSI HBA.

 

[jgreco]

Sorry for taking a time to reply but life got in the way.

No worries! Let us know how it goes.

 

[fullbodydenim]

Yeah its a little disappointing HP doesnt have a proper upgrade path from their H220 -> H240. Dell has the H200 -> H310 -> H330, IBM has the M1015 -> M1115 -> N2215 and LSI has the SAS3081E-R -> SAS9200 -> SAS9300 and onwards. I went with a PCI-E 1.0 LSI SAS3081E-R for my first build and just got it working with 5 x 500GB SATA disks in a raidz1. I already have a LSI SAS9200-8i that I need to flash to learn how to transfer the data between my old and new NAS.