Beginners Guide To The Dell H200 HBA Card
If you are building a NAS or storage appliance for your homelab or server application, the Dell H200 HBA card can be a great way to get extra storage connectivity out of a single PCI-E lane. This means that from a single machine, you can pack a lot of storage to build some high-throughput machines.
In this post, we will discuss the basic history of these cards and their applications in environments. New units will be talked about and how they reach the market. And finally, the firmware running on the HBA cards and what that means for the features available to you when you install the card in your system. If you are thinking about picking up the card, you can check out the following kit available in our store.
HBA Card History
The Dell H200 is a standard card available in Dell's PowerEdge server series to more accessible comment up the system to the backplane of the custom PowerEdge case of the systems. This configuration can be seen in the below photo.
Across the range of PowerEdge skews and generations, the Dell H200 has been a critical component as it provides a vast range of Raid and JBOD features required for various use cases from computing to storage.
The Dell H200 is most commonly found in the Dell PowerEdge servers. As previously mentioned is used as an internal Raid card to connect the system to the drives attached to the cases backplane via MINAS 8087 cables. Using forward breakout MiniSAS-8087 to SATA cables (the cable below), you can connect the card to regular hard drives without a backplane. This makes the card very flexible for any use case. You need storage, and the motherboard does not provide enough connectivity or storage features.
Today the cards have been discontinued from new production. Any existing cards you will find on marketplaces will be second-hand, refurbished or grey market cards. In the following sourcing, these cards will be discussed in more detail.
“New” Units Available Today
So if you are in the market for one of these cards either for your Homelab or Homeserver, you may see a lot of listings and be thinking, “So why are there so many cards available even if the card has been discontinued?”. This is because even though the cards have been discontinued, grey market factories still produce cards if they have machines set up to make them or if they still have production quotas on existing orders. Due to their being in the distribution channel for these products after they are produced, they are sold as refurbished cards on the second-hand market but are essentially new models. As the existing deployment of PowerEdge systems is decommissioned as their warranty periods go to the end of life, you will also find a lot of their internal components being recycled back onto the second-hand market, leading to even higher amounts of these cards available for less critical deployments.
Due to these two factors, these cards are very prevalent, and you can find them for affordable prices on eBay or our store here at the below link:
Firmware
With the Dell H200, along with the physical hardware to provide the storage features, the card runs some software in the form of firmware that runs on the card to achieve features like RAID and control how the card manages the connected devices. Depending on your application for the HBA card, you may want to choose a different firmware to remove or unlock some features.
By default, the H200 firmware on the card enables the disks to be managed as raid devices and exposed to the operating system as a single RAID disk. Suppose you are running a storage server with something like Unraid, Free NAS or using a file system like ZFS where disk devices need to be exposed transparently to the operating system so the software can manage the disk and storage on them. For the storage, implementation said the easiest way to enable the Dell H200 card to run as a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) card that will expose the disks with all of their S.M.A.R.T data directly to the operating system. This is done by flashing the card's firmware to the LSI 9211-8i, which unlocks the card's IT mode. You can check out the following guide for detailed information on how to flash these cards’ firmware to your desired version.
https://www.dell.com/community/PowerEdge-HDD-SCSI-RAID/R515-with-H200-with-IT-firmware/td-p/3645137
Wrapping Up
You should now have a better idea of the Dell H200 HBA card's history, where some of these “New” units are coming from, and how the firmware running on the HBA card plays a vital role in the features you have available on the card. If you're looking to pick up a Dell H200, the Server Labs Aus store has Dell H200 kits with the card and connectors you need to get the most out of all the available storage bandwidth.
If you're looking for any other HBA cards or kits, you can view our full range in the following collection in our store.
Connect Further
- If you are in the market for some homelab or home server products, check our store's products.
- You can also find some of our other blog posts.
- Connect on our social media accounts over on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
