PCI E-Sata Card for PowerEdge R620

Hello darkog

These are all of the external controllers validated for the R620:

342-0910 6Gb SAS HBA, Dual Port PCI-e Full Height
342-3892 SAS 6Gbps HBA External Cntrl Low Profile
342-3891 PERC H810 RAID Adapter,1GB NVCache for External JBOD, Low Profile

The first two are designed to be connected to a HDD or tape storage unit that has its own RAID controller. They are basically pass-through devices that are not capable of RAID management. The H810 is an external RAID controller that is designed to be connected to a JBOD type unit that does not have it's own management as it is a RAID controller card capable of array management.

Thanks

thanks. are there Dell part #'s?

Thanks I have one of the SAS cards. My issue is, we need to connect an existing E-Sata drive to this server to dump data back and forth. Any PCI E-sata cards you know of that work? Is there a change in PCI architecture on these models compared  to 610 model?

I included the part numbers in the above post. The first set of numbers before the description is the part number.

There are no e-sata cards validated for the server. The H810 should work for what you are wanting to do, but it is a very expensive component to fulfill that need. That card would be under-utilized for your purpose. You may want to just ask around for non-validated e-sata cards that others have tested in the system.

The big change in PCIe with our 12th generation servers is that the PCIe controller is now on the CPU. All previous PCIe controllers are on the system board. Because of this you can have PCIe slots that are not functional if you do not have all of the CPU slots populated in a server.

Thanks

Has anyone found anything (other than the Dell SAS controllers) for an eSATA or USB 3.0 card that works in the R620?

No, I did not find a solution yet. The way it was explained to me was the architecture is completely different and *might* be related cpu in server. 

No I am afraid not.

From: LANCORP

Subject: eSATA for R620

Hey, thanks.  Not sure if you got my message in the friend invite, but did you ever solve the issue with finding a compatible eSATA card for the R620?  Something this easy shouldn't be this hard!  

I know it's a year later, but I've been told by our Technical Solutions Consultant that the following card should work, but is unsupported:

It's a StarTech 2-Port SATA 6 Gbps PCI Express eSATA Controller Card, Manufacturer Part# PEXESAT32 | Dell Part# A3793049

Dell is sold out when I try to view it at the moment, but it's easy to find with retailers.  In my case, I hope to present this to a VMware guest O/S (Windows Server 2012) with passthrough.  This will give me the eSATA connection I need to backup to our rackmounted external drive bays, whose drives go offsite daily.

Just ordered today, so I won't know until next week if it works or not.  I also plan to test the speed I get, but honestly given the number of hoops the data must travel through to reach the destination (in my case), I'm not sure it's going to be stellar.  I was getting ~90MB/s on a physical Windows 2008 server.

Any news on the PEXESAT32 card? I tried the PEXESAT322I about 6 months ago, and it did not work.

Just got off the phone with Dell with this same issue; trying to use the StarTech 2 port eSATA card (PEXESAT32) in a Dell R620.  They said it was unsupported, and that was the end of the conversation.  The support tech did not have any recommendations for eSATA cards, just the Dell PowerVault solutions.

I've updated all the BIOS/fw/idrac firmware to the current (as of this post), with no luck.

The server does this when this card is in it. : http://pastebin.com/asJuM8dB

Love to hear of any eSATA cards that work...

Thanks.

I don't have the full error details, but the UEFI pre-boot exception error is also what I was getting with the PEXESAT322I.

I really wish Dell would resolve this issue as it would make the R620 much more appealing for a wider-range of customers.

Thanks for the update. The StarTek one I used was the one recommended by Dell and it did not work last time I tried. I am waiting for Dell to release new BIOS updated and I will try again.

For those interested, i did find an eSATA card that works.

It's an IOCrest branded, model "SI-PEX40065" card.  It is based on the 6 gig Marvell 9215 chipset.  I have two of these cards in the Dell R620 server, and it boots fine.  Windows Server 2012 R2 sees the interfaces under Device Manager / IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers as a Standard SATA AHCI Controller.  Windows also sees harddrives on the eSATA drive shelf i have hooked to it.  It doesn't see all the drives like i had expected it to, but i think this issue is some kind of multiplexer something or another issue.  Have to beat my head against that now.

Another card that did *not* work for me was the Addonics Model ADSA3GPX1-2E (Silicon Image 3132 Chipset)
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Apologies in advance for reviving an old thread. However I figured I would leave this info here in this thread in the event someone else is looking for a solution to a PCI-E based HBA that will appropriately handle SATA devices.

Recently I decided to toss in a bunch of SSD in one of my R620's and rip out the H310 and replace it with an HBA appropriate to handling the SSD's.

I can report to anyone else looking to put an HBA that will work with the R620 and additionally appropriately handle SSD as ATA devices via SAS the Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 card based on the Marvell 9840 chipset works nicely.

In order to install the card on the server and get cables to it does however require a small bit of modification to the PCI-E riser to create room for the cables to pass thru. In a three PCI-E slot R620 I utilized the middle slot (PCI-E via CPU-2) as the least amount of modification was required on the riser via this slot to accommodate the sas cables.

You will need 2 SAS SFF-8087 right angle to SFF-8087 cables to route from the SAS backplane to the HBA via the existing paths in the chassis 0.75m cables will do nicely.

I can confirm under linux via the mvsas driver that SSD drives are appropriately identified and handled as ATA devices. (mvsas --> libsas --> sas_ata --> libata). All ATA commands can be directly passed through to the SSD. Most importantly Data Set Management ( ATA TRIM) works just as it should (fstrim, blkdiscard, etc).

This is unlike the LSI based cards which via the mpt2sas driver via firmware will pass SCSI WRITE SAME but will only succeed if the SSD ALSO supports Deterministic Read Zero after TRIM.