RES2SV240 SAS Expander - No HDD power save spin-down

[idata]

I have recently setup an RES2SV240 SAS Expander card (being run off of LSI 9211-8i SAS 8 port card) and have noticed the harddrives are not powering down in power save mode. Im running the drives as stand alone, not in any sort of RAID.

Do HDDs not power down when run off this Expander? Is there a configuration setting that needs to be set? I have upgraded the firmware on the expander to the lastest version.

Raymond

[idata · Accepted solution]

Raymond,

There's no configuration or management for the RES2SV240. It's just like the AXX6DRV3GEXP and AXX4DRV3GEXP expander backplanes in card form (granted without drive connectors). The RES2SV240 provides a Serial GPIO (SGPIO) interface. I think you'll find that intelligent power management is passed from the controller to the disks via SGPIO. It's really the controller that has the smarts to know when to power down the disks, not the expander.

Regards, John

[idata]

Thanks John. Confirming what you said, I just verified the LSI card does not support power down. Will have to find another SAS card. Thanks.

[idata]

Follow-up question... I purchased an Intel RS2WC080 (8 port SAS Raid) that does support spindown under power save. (the RS2WC080 is driving two RES2SV240 Expanders) Everything appears to work except the drives are not powering down. The information from the Intel Raid Web Console 2 app indicates that 'Power savings on unconfigured drives" is Enabled and that the 'Drive Standby time' is 30mins. The drive standby time was originally showing 0 and had to flash the firmware on the card to the latest version to get it to show as 30mins as the firmware was 2 years out of date (the card was made in July 2012). The drives are unconfigured and are running as JBOD. Looks like the firmware update resolved the one issue with the time showing 0, but not sure if there is something I'm missing here.

[idata]

Raymond,

Sorry for not responding sooner. Intel RAID controllers don't provide drive power save. That feature is disabled because we saw inconsistencies with HDD reaction times for power down and power up. This could be seen with the same HDD models, just different drive firmware levels. Sometimes disks took too long to power up and the result was a drive being marked as failed. The controller firmware was changed to disable the power save feature even though the capability in the BIOS or web console still shows.

Sorry about the confusion.

John