![](\"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2021\/05\/HP-2BP420-300x146.jpg\")
<\/a><\/div>\nA 2GB Flash Backed Write Cache) FBWC with super capacitor backup (\u00a315.00)<\/p>\n
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and 4 x 6TB SAS drives (\u00a370.00 each).<\/p>\n
The 6TB SAS drives are half the price of what I originally paid for the 3TB drives and are enterprise rated so should be good for being on 100% of the time. <\/p>\n
The drive cage on the MicroServer Gen 8 will accept SATA or SAS drives, but the on-board B210i controller is SATA only.<\/p>\n
If I attach the 4 bay cage to the HP P420<\/a>, it should then allow me to use SAS drives instead of SATA.<\/p>\n The HP P420<\/a>, will be recognised by the iLO and while not officially supported, being an HP product it should allow the server to boot from it, this will allow me to use 2 x 300GB SAS drives in a hardware Raid 10 setup for the boot disks and the 4 x 6TB disks as pass through devices to setup as Raid 10 under ZFS.<\/p>\n If I can’t boot from the 300GB disks via the HP P420<\/a>, I will use a couple of SATA SSDs instead and connect them to the on-board controller.<\/p>\n This is all well and good for a new build, but I need to save the data that I have on the server already.<\/p>\n My intention is to attach one or more of the new 6TB disks to the HP P420<\/a>, create a new zpool and copy the data across.<\/p>\n I can then install a new OS on the 300GB SAS drives, install ZFS and import the Zpool.<\/p>\n This will give me a clean install and I can then re-install Docker and just load the images I am actually still using.<\/p>\n So the parts all arrive safely and I install the HP P420<\/a>, attach a 300GB SAS drive and a 6TB SAS drive to it and boot up the server, go into the HP P420<\/a> controller configuration and I only see the 300GB SAS drive!<\/p>\n I swap out the 6TB drive for a second one and try again with same end result.<\/p>\n Some searching on the web later and it turns out that the 6TB SAS drives I have are 4kn drives and are NOT supported on my HP P420<\/a> controller, see this article<\/a> for an explanation.<\/p>\n It turns out that none of my LSI controllers support 4kn drives according to the compatibility list at BitDeals<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here’s wishing I had known about this incompatibility before I bought the HP P420<\/a>, ah well live and learn I suppose – I can always sell it on to someone else.<\/p>\n I have now purchased an LSI 9267-8i <\/a>controller for $18.22 (\u00a313.15) with free P&P from China.<\/p>\n This controller has the 2208<\/a> chipset that does support 4kn drives as well as RAID0, 1 and 10.<\/p>\n It remains to be seen if I can boot from this controller and use my 300GB SAS drives for the OS, or if I will need to use some SATA SSD drives connected to the on-board B210i controller instead.<\/p>\n The controller arrived after about 14 days, which was not bad. <\/p>\n Well as luck would have it, this controller sees the 4kn drives, but as 498GB unsupported disks!<\/p>\n I then did loads more searching and was considering a Dell Perc H310, but that was around \u00a380.00 ($110.00) and would also have meant all sorts of extra cables and adapters, totalling nearly the same as the card itself.<\/p>\n I then stubbled across a post on the HP forums<\/a> about why the HP P840<\/a> or HP H240<\/a> do not support 4Kn drives in RAID but work for HBA mode.<\/p>\n The HP H240<\/a> is a 12Gbps card and in HBA mode simply passes the drives straight through to the OS even though it cannot even see them, just like the HP P420<\/a> if you look in the disk configuration utility.<\/p>\n I purchased an HP H240<\/a> HBA card for \u00a326.00 ($36.00) from an Ebay in Lancashire.<\/p>\n This arrived by next day delivery and was installed in the Microserver and sure enough a 6TB 4Kn drive was visible to the OS!<\/p>\n Finally I could move forwards with the upgrade.<\/p>\n I attached 2 6TB disks to the HP H240<\/a> HBA and configured them as a new zpool of 10.9TB in size.<\/p>\n Next I used zfs send\/receive to copy all of the data from the existing zpool to the new one – I take snapshot backups of all the file systems on a nightly basis so I can just pick which snapshot to use for the transfers.<\/p>\n The transfers were averaging around 1.46Gbps – a 2.55TB file system transferred in just over 3 hours 58 minutes. <\/p>\n I then saved a load of configuration information (passwd, shadow, group, sudoers, crontabs, etc) onto the new disks before shutting the server down and removing all the disks.<\/p>\n I attached my 2 x 300GB SAS drives and mounted an Ubuntu ISO via the remote console and installed a new OS using software RAID onto the disks.<\/p>\n After the install had completed and successfully booted, I installed the zfs software, shut down the server swapped the disk caddies over, installed the 4 x 6TB SAS drives in the bays at the front of the Microserver and moved the SFF-8087 connection from the B210i connection on the motherboard to the HP H240<\/a> HBA.<\/p>\n After booting up I was able to import and rename the new zpool and re-install docker and zabbix.<\/p>\n Finally I attached the remaining 2 x 6TB disks as mirrors.<\/p>\n After all the drama over the disk controllers, the upgrade itself was simple by comparison with no issues.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As part of my original install I tried a couple of LSI controllers, but while the second one I tried was recognised by the motherboard, it would not boot from a disk attached to it, and it is not officially supported anyway. I also gave up on having all of the extra disks mounted on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":86,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,3],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-homelab","tag-networking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":262,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions\/262"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/myhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2021\/05\/LSI-2B9267-8i-300x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/div>\n![](\"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2021\/05\/HP-2BP420-1-300x146.jpg\")
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