A sever is fitted with a HP SAS Expander card and 10x disks (2x mirrored Arrays).
The server is not detecting any logical volumes or physical disks. So is it ok to bypass the expander card and connect one of the backplanes directly to rule out either the Controller (on the system board) or the Expander card?
The Expander card holds no array configuration right? So bypassing it should be fine as long as a whole single array is connected to the Controller?
Thanks in advance
Carlos
Best Answer
The HP SAS expander card does not have any array configuration. Drive array metadata is located on the disks, not the controller.
I feel like we're missing something here...
My concern is that bypassing the expander in this case will tell the RAID controller that the drive positions changed. The change may be above the threshold of what your P410i can handle, and you could possible lose your array.
Example behind an expander:
Example without an expander:
Basically, the port numbers change, so it's a bit of a pain.