HP ML115 with P400 Smart Array Controller

hphp-proliantraid

I have a HP ML115 server I have installed a HP P400 Smart Array Controller card, I also have 4 x 1TB Samsung Hard drives.

I'm unable to get the the controller to detect the hard drives, I have changed the drives to SATA 1.5G without luck, I have also tried connecting a single 80GB Maxtor drive without luck

The controller shows up just after boot and tries to initialize, The controller does not show up in the POST prompt, although I can see the controller when booting off a ACU CD

THe controller firmware is a little old v4.12 but I have no way to update it.

Any ideas on how I can get this going?

Best Answer

Fran Garcia is correct, you can't just pick your own SATA disks with those controllers - HERE's the quickspecs to help you choose the correct disk part numbers.

Related Solutions

Smart Array P400 Drive Failure

I'd start here: HP Smart Array P400 controller - Questions & Answers

Honestly though almost every decent RAID controller acts the same in the case of a single drive failure in a two disk RAID 1 array. Since the Smart Array is a true hardware RAID controller either drive can fail and the OS will still work just about as fast as it did with two drives. If you had a software based RAID controller (Some of the cheaper Promise models for instance) then you sometimes need a boot diskette to force booting off the second drive.

The HP Smart Array's are very good RAID controllers, they are decently fast, very reliable and dead simple to use. They are definitely my favorite embedded RAID controller. One great feature they have is being able to pull a set of drives from one system and stick it into another for recovery etc. purposes. Lot's of other RAID controller get very confused when you present them an array pulled from a different controller, not so the Smart Array. They just work!

Slow DL360 Smart Array P400i RAID

This is several questions in one, so I'll try to address a few of them.

I typically set Smart Array controllers to leverage a higher write cache ratio. I prefer to have 75% write cache because the OS (using the XFS filesystem) caches aggressively. XFS will make a difference, but what are you tuning for? Are you tuning to simply achieve specific numbers, or is there an application requirement driving this?

ext3 isn't the fastest filesystem out there. But you have some mount options (e.g. noatime) and journal settings you could tweak.
I don't use LVM, especially with HP controllers that can provide many of the same benefits.
You have I/O scheduler and elevator settings (e.g. noop or deadline, in this case) that can be tuned, but that's a function of your application's actual needs.

If you do go with XFS, try a basic config then try some advanced configuration settings. Over time, I've ended up with mount parameters very similar to the one in the original link.

I just ran the following iozone command line on an XFS partition contained within a DL380 G5 with P400i, 12GB RAM and 8 x 146GB 10k drives. The elevator is set to deadline:

Command line used: iozone -t1 -i0 -i1 -i2 -r1m -s24g

initial writers  =  348957.75 KB/sec
rewriters        =  335130.03 KB/sec
readers          =  132851.70 KB/sec
re-readers       =  137116.27 KB/sec
random readers   =   35774.41 KB/sec
random writers   =  250618.38 KB/sec

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Smart Array P400 Drive Failure

Slow DL360 Smart Array P400i RAID

Related Topic