eSATA Port Multiplier in HP N54L...

  • Hi all,


    I've got a HP N54L and have been running OMV for a while. All is well, but I've been considering adding more storage after playing around with the almost complete ZFS plugin.


    I currently have 4 drives in the N54L's 4 bays in a soft RAID. I am considering moving those to a RAID-Z2 but expanding at the same time.


    The ideal number of drives for a RAID-Z2 is:


    4, 6, 10, 18, 34 etc for 4K sector HDD's.


    6 drives probably won't be enough and 18 is a little overkill for my needs so I am considering 10 x 4TB drives.


    I have been looking around for a JBOD enclosure and have come across the Icy Box IB-3680SU3 8 bay enclosure.


    My questions is: can anyone confirm that the eSATA port in the HP N54L supports port multiplier under Debian Wheezy? Also, has anyone plugged 8 disks into it?


    Thanks :)

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    It does not support port multiplier. I had to put a dual port esata card in mine for the external esata 8 bay enclosure I used. It did work well until the enclosure's power supply failed.

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  • The icy box that I have been looking at provides power- do you think this would be a problem? What eSATA card did you get?


    EDIT: Sorry, misread that as the HP's PSU dying.


    Could you recommend some hardware for 10 drives?

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    I got a cheap sil3132 based card. It was flashed with IT firmware so OMV could see each drive. Then I used raid from OMV's web interface.


    I used this enclosure but mine didn't come with the card. Here was my old system. My current home server has 12 drives in it. I use an LSI 9211-8i in IT mode for the 8 drive raid 5 (samsung F4 2 tb drives). All the other drives are connected to the motherboard.

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  • Nice build. I'm looking to do the same thing but with 10 drives in RAID-Z2. It should leave 2 bays free in the HP, one for a SSD caching (at some point) and the other as a spare slot (My OS drive is run from the SATA on the board next to the USB and is sat in the optical bay).


    Do you mean one of these? eBay number: 151495721938


    That shouldn't be a problem it's only £6.39 from HK. The x1 slot is still available so this should work out nicely.


    Could you point me in the direction of the firmware you used? I've had a quick google but I'm getting Italian results. ;)

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    That card should work. Mine was two e-sata only with no internal ports. It was a cheap Rosewill card. I don't know if the firmware for that card will work with the ebay card. Hopefully it will come with the IT firmware already on it or will include a cd with it.

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  • I've heard back from the seller and their answer was "don't know, sorry" :-/


    I also found this: 231032800368


    Looks more like the card you have but says in the description that it's supports port multiplier and doesn't mention raid so I guess its the same card already in IT mode. It's from the U.S. Though, so will cost about £20 and I'll probably get import on that too. :-/


    The hunt goes on..


    Edit: got it :) 320890941897


    Edit 2: looks like you enable either the internal or external ports via a jumper. Also, I'll have to do something with that bracket but that shouldn't be an issue. Wire cutters, pliers and drill- hey presto, low profile >:-)


    Edit 3: do you know if ASMedia ASM1061 works under Linux? There is also this: 261654850621 which is already low profile and faster.


    Edit 4: seem to be finding the answers to my own questions ;) found this: http://superuser.com/questions…ler-supported-under-linux


    Think I might take a chance on the ASMedia card. I'll wait until tomorrow to order it. I'm hoping no one will chime in and tell me it's flakey :P



  • Hi,


    I'm an owner of HP N54L, so I can tell you some of my experience on this.
    The hardware itself, yes, supports SATA multiplier on eSATA port, but the BIOS doesn't. So you have to look for a BIOS hack (Google is your friend), without the hack, internal SATA for ODD can't even run in AHCI mode.
    I did the hack and everything works fine.


    I bought an Orico 3539RUS3 (USB3 + eSATA), a 3-bay enclosure, set it to CLEAR RAID mode, with BIOS setting to AHCI/RAID mode you will be able to see all 3 ext. drives.
    One more note, if you use RAID mode, inside the system BIOS you might not be able to see all disks (probably another bug), so in case you want a specific disk to boot, you might have trouble to pick the one you want (but the one on ODD port should be fine), the RAID BIOS will tell you have a multiple of drives belongs to port #4.
    If you choose AHCI, you will see only first disk of your enclosure in BIOS, no worry, under linux they can be recognized, I tested with OMV and all disks can be used.


    Hope this helps.

  • Thanks for the info.


    I'm already running the modded BIOS as I wanted the 5th SATA port to run at full speed and the ability to hot swap the drives. I haven't got as far as buying the JBOD enclosure yet as I've been busy with work and just haven't got around to it but I'll be sure to try it out when I get one.


    I've already got an ASM1061, but I can make use of this in addition to the N54L's port. I've not used the BIOS soft RAID, but instead plan to have a ZRAID2.

  • Thanks for the info.


    I'm already running the modded BIOS as I wanted the 5th SATA port to run at full speed and the ability to hot swap the drives. I haven't got as far as buying the JBOD enclosure yet as I've been busy with work and just haven't got around to it but I'll be sure to try it out when I get one.


    I've already got an ASM1061, but I can make use of this in addition to the N54L's port. I've not used the BIOS soft RAID, but instead plan to have a ZRAID2.



    The soft RAID is useless, linux will bypass that and seeing independent disks, it only works for Windows.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    Nope, it works, you just need a BIOS hack.


    Have you used it? I had the hacked bios and it still did not recognize my enclosure.

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  • Have you used it? I had the hacked bios and it still did not recognize my enclosure.


    Yes, you can see from my pictures....in BIOS, Port #4 is actually the eSATA port (0-3 are the removable bay, 5 is ODD), here I turned on RAID BIOS so that I can see them clearly before loading OS, but actually using AHCI with hacked BIOS will work as well. (For some reason I cannot show the drive model number, so I wiped it from the JPG)

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    It is definitely picky about the chipset that the external enclosure uses then. It only recognizes one drive in my four bay sans digital and eight bay rosewill enclosures.

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  • I'm not sure if a recent firmware update has fixed the issues, but when I looked into USB3/eSATA enclosures with JMicron in the past, they were experiencing a plethora of issues. Mainly, the unit putting the drives to sleep too frequently, unnecessarily increasing the start/stop count. I've always favoured ASMedia for the enclosures I have. This was a known issue with some of the 1 bay Oricos. I take it that you obviously don't have this issue with yours?

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