HP H240 more than 8 drives?

Hi Guys,

So I have a server running with a HP H240 HBA and there are 8 drives hooked up to it. I use the HBA to pass through my drives to a truenas box and it’s working great.

According to the manual it says it allows up to 200 drives, but has room for 2 phsyical mini-sas connectors to 4 sata which allows 8 drives per HBA. How to get more drives attached? I need 16 drives to be hooked up.

Can someone please help, thanks
Cheers!

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You need a SAS Expander, they come in different formats but I imagine one in the form of a PCI card form-factor is what you’re looking for.

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You can use more drives with a SAS expander card. Such as the HPE 12G SAS Expander Card.

Thanks @marelooke and @NZSNIPER do you have any suggestions on which one to buy? I prefer refurbished, will a 6Gb card be sufficient?

3Gb/s have a 2TB limit. 6Gb/s should be fine for 8x6Gb/s into 16 SATA HDD’s. Check the compatibility of the card you’re looking at to be sure, such as the SFF connector. You can get adapter cables.

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Do you have a particular case that you will be fitting 16 drives into?
If it’s got hot-swap bays, you might have a backplane or something. Some of them already have expansion built in (not all)

Five years ago someone posted elsewhere about a HPE model number [edit: 46M0997 thx snipe] 46m997 and some links to some deals at the time.
I imagine they are all long sold out, but might give an idea of the kinda thing you want?

At the time, there was talk of firmware, so once you find a decent bargain, double check the model on google / whatever for reports of “slow hdd speeds” or “nnlnnn won’t accept 4tb cards”

I had an old one, which seemed to have died, but I had an extra HBA anyway, so was not fussed

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IBM 46M0997 ServeRAID 6Gb

I was looking at buying a Lenovo for $50 a while ago but never committed.
Kicking self

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Thanks! I have a case with 16 hotswap bays, all sata/sas. I think it has no expander built in. I will check out the hpe 46M0997.
I needed an expander to replace the 10 port sata hba which I got brand new for 40 euros. It’s one I needed at the time but its crashing my truenas vm all the time when under write load.

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I go used enterprise stuff; it’s not shiny and new, but you can get reasonable performance out of stuff like that.
Otherwise, it might be cheaper to get another sas hba, and just use two of them?

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Yeah, used enterprise stuff is balr. It works and is fairly cheap. I have calculated for a second HBA but it won’t be sufficient when I want to add more drives. I will take it in consideration though. Because an extra HPE H240 will set me back 65 euros and a IBM expander will cost me at least 98 dollar + 25 euros for shipping + 21% added tax.

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