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Re: ML350p Gen8 - Hard Drives, SBS and Controller??

 
NickZ
Occasional Visitor

Re: ML350p Gen8 - Hard Drives, SBS and Controller??

The initial purchase of HP drives is more expensive.  My main complaint isn't the initial cost.  It is the fact that HP only warrants Midline drives for one year.  Most "Consumer" based drives have 3YR warranties.  Enterprise SATA drives come with 5YR warranties.

 

This would be a non issue if hard drives were more reliable, but we all have had a number of hard drive failures over the years.

eXchange
Occasional Collector

Re: ML350p Gen8 - Hard Drives, SBS and Controller??

To attach the Crucial M4 SSD w/o tray seems to be mechanical instable. Have anybody tried to modify blank trays with holes to install an SSD? It seems possible, but didn't test it yet.
juliusJ
New Member

Re: ML350p Gen8 - Hard Drives, SBS and Controller??

Yep that's what I did. The drives work great! I have them in a raid 1 and im getting gread io and 500+MBps data rates.

 

I modiflyed g5 drive plates to do such.

 

The only downside I've had so far is that without the temp monitor on the drive plates the server is very loud... I might just have to spend $600 to get the drive plates.....

TedMittelstaedt
Occasional Visitor

Re: ML350p Gen8 - Hard Drives, SBS and Controller??

I am partners in a computer consulting firm that sells HP servers.  I am also a former electronics service tech.

 

Let's inject some reality into this discussion.

 

The HP LFF 3TB SATA 7200rpm server disks cost $900.00 per drive.  And the only warranty available is 1 year.

 

An over the counter Seagate 3TB 7200rpm SATA drive is $170.00  With a FIVE YEAR warranty.

 

So to create a raid 5 array, minimum 3 drives, we are talking an extra TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS for HP branded drives that are a) Identical in size, b) Indentical in speed, c) have a 1 year warranty INSTEAD OF a FIVE year warranty from Seagate.

 

The LFF drives from HP are identical in size to the Seagates.  They should be since Seagate makes them for HP (this is a guess - the drive aluminum case looks like it came out of the same mold.  It could have been someone else.  But there's only a few disk drive makers still alive so you know it was one of them)

 

The only significant firmware modifications that HP would have made would have been 2:  First would be to the S.M.A.R.T. data since the vendor-returned SMART data is not standardized, and HP could have taken the lazy way out on this.  With all commercial RAID cards the manufacturer puts a table in the card that has the commonly used drive models and the SMART data layout.  That is how the card knows that attribute 5 position 7 in the returned data is the temperature and not the power on hours, or some such.  That's with the cards that do a lot of SMART data processing.  Most of them do not and simply query the SMART data for drive health Good/Bad which as anyone who has dealt with a lot of failed drives knows is a pile of bull pucky.  HP might have decided to put in it's disk drive RFP that the SMART data had to be standardized for the next 10 years across all drive models or some such, merely to make it easier for their firmware programmers.  The second thing HP could have done is to require the manufacturer to turn off the "auto retry" feature whereby when a drive detects a bad spot, it immediately reallocates it to the spare sector table and returns garbage on the sector read.  Some drives will attempt to reread the bad spot a couple hundred times attempting to guess what might have actually been there.  That behavior will screw up an array.

 

But all of this is sheer speculation.  I don't work for HP and haven't dropped a SATA breakout box onto a Gen8 server to see what it actually does.  HP may have simply had the OEM change the firmware so the drive reports HP's model number instead of the OEM's.

 

From a businessman's perspective - that is, from the perspective of my customers - all they care about is the warranty.  The new HP drives may cook breakfast and give a heck of a BJ but that doesn't matter chickenscratch to the buyer, all they care about is the warranty.

 

I don't want to be telling the customer a year and a half after buying the server that they have to fork over another $900 for a replacement 3TB drive.  Do I trust the new Gen8 drives and their alleged advanced electronics?  Are you out of your mind?  Sure - 10 years from now when I see all the Gen8 servers on Ebay with their ORIGINAL DRIVES still going strong - then I'll trust them.  But until then, a disk drive is a mechanical object with moving parts.  Moving parts wear out.  Period.  There are no differences between a 7200 SATA drive you buy for your desktop and a 7200rpm SATA server drive that matter - unless we are talking green drives.  But, gamers aren't fools and they are keeping the green drives from taking over the consumer drive market.

 

If your plans are to build a server with a bunch of 15K rpm drives no larger than 300Mb per drive, your going to go with SFF.  The HP SFF drives are obscene on a price-per-megabyte but so are everyone elses.  In that arena, you go with the HP drives because in a database server the drives are being flailed to death.  In the SFF arena, things are different.

 

But people in the LFF arena are out looking for storage.  It would take a far more powerful server than any Gen8 server to flail a 3TB disk to death.  Imagine moving 10 times the amount of data in and out of memory and on to the disk.  People who have need of storing large images - medical imaging, design houses, and so on - they want an endless supply of disk space, there is no such thing as too much disk space on a server.  Their typical use is to write the large file to the disk, and it sits there for 2 years, being read maybe 8 times.  You do not need all kinds of fancy features.

 

The entire point of a RAID array is redundancy.  So if a disk fails the array CYA's.  There is no need of fancy disk features here because if a disk dies you just replace it.  The only place where the fancy features matter is if your replacing disks in advance of failure because your need is 24x7 and the server can never go down.  in that case yes you do care about all the extra SMART data.  You want the disk out of the server before it fails.  But realistically, those shops run backup servers and if they know what they are doing a disk crash in a server shouldn't bother them.

 

I realy wonder if HP fired all their good designers on this one.  The extra blinky lights on the front of the disk that spin around and around and around all day long are juvenile.  You can only see them in the rack mounted machines because in the tower servers, HP put a plastic door on the front of the server.  So all that eye candy is behind a door that blocks it.  I suppose it looks really impressive in the dark in a large colocate with a couple hundred rack mounted HP servers when you have had about 10-15 bong hits.  But only deaf people would have an office inside a colocate with all those servers.  Even the colocate techs don't spend anymore time in the server racks than they have to.

 

I haven't tried forcing a Gen 7 caddy on a SFF drive into a gen 8 server.  But, I can tell you from experience that a LFF carrier from a Gen 7 is about 3 millimeters wider than the LFF Gen 8 drive blank.  You CANNOT force it in without completely destroying it and likely damaging the server.  Maybe you can do this with the SFF carrier, but not the LFF carrier.

 

Until the aftermarket comes out with LFF Gen8 drive caddies you have 2 choices if you don't want to bend over and get shafted on the LFF drives from HP. (there are aftermarket Gen8 SFF drive caddies being advertised now)  First, you can modify the LFF drive blank, drill 2 holes in the side and put countersunk screws in it.  The hard drive will drop right into the drive blank, and you can put in the screws and slide the drive right in.  There's a Youtube video from a guy that did this to the SFF drive blank and the principle is the same with the LFF drive blanks.

 

Second you can take a cereal box and cut strips of cardboard from it and 2 strips glued together will give you the same thickness of plastic as the LFF Gen 8 carrier uses.  Put some screws in and screw the cardboard to the disk drive and slip it right in.  Then put a bracket on the front of the server to block the drives from coming out by themselves.  Obviously this works better on the midtower servers than the 1Us.

 

I'm working on a website that documents the differences and workarounds.  HP is going to have to do a better job of keeping non-HP drives out of their Gen8 servers than by tampering with the physical drive carriers.

bkblake
New Member

Re: ML350p Gen8 - Hard Drives, SBS and Controller??

I feel exactly the same way.  This isn't the first time I have felt screwed by HP.  I own a small IT consulting shop, and this drive thing is a no-go for us.  Dell is looking better and better.  Regardless of what you think, these drives ARE NOT SPECIAL.  The tray is still crappy plastic and aluminum and the drive is still a standard drive.  I took one of the new Gen8 LFF drives out of the caddy, and there is no difference.  You can stick any drive in the caddy and it works fine.  Those Fancy LED's don't even talk directly to the drive.  The drive talks to the RAID controller, and the caddy talks to the RAID controller.  There is no connection between the two.  Yes, the LED's are a nice touch, but that could easily be accomplished with ANY drives.  I am returning this Gen8 server I just purchased, and I am done with HP.

 

Hell, even Apple, the KING of proprietary hardware, allows you to use your own memory and drives to upgrade their equipment.  Give me a break!

 

Incidentally, HP's drives are garbage anyway.  We were seeing drives failing a little too often it seemed, so we took about a dozen servers we support, and saved the drives that failed for a little over a year (and yes, we were updating firmware, and yes these were genuine HP drives), and we have 17 failed drives all less than 3 years old!  These are in different server models, and in different locations, so it's not environmental.  Funny thing is, 21 of them are Seagates.  Since then we have been replacing them with WD Enterprise drives (5 year warranty), and haven't lost one of them yet in almost a year.  I absolutely refuse to pay 3x for drives that are obviously not designed to last, or warrantied any better.

 

Incidentally, my company applied to be an HP reseller and/or authorized service location a few years back, and we were denied because they said there was another HP dealer already in our area.  We checked into it, and it was a ONE MAN SHOP that had gone out of business over a year before we applied.  HP has been clueless for years...

 

Dell has been teasing our office with great deals for a while now.  Thanks for making it easy HP!

WaltReed
Regular Visitor

Re: ML350p Gen8 - Hard Drives, SBS and Controller??

I realize this is an older thread, but I thought I'd add my experiences to this.

 

First, I would strongly caution against using the Crucial M4 SSD's in a server role. They are designed for desktop use. In fact, I've had 3 of 4 fail simultaneously in a RAID 10 configuration. The issue has to do with how the drives do internal garbage collection. An alternative is an enterprise SSD like the p400e models from Crucial. The difference is in how they handle internal garbage collection and how much space is allocated to it. The 400GB model actually is a 512G model with a huge garbage collection buffer and much larger ability to remap "worn" blocks. Just something to consider if you care about reliability.

 

As for the SmartDrive issue - frankly this is engineering from Sales and Marketing. Inside the carriers are standard drive with HP's firmware. There is NO connection between the drive and the carrier. The carrier simply connects to the backplane directly. So - what's smart about it? Simply this: It has more "idiot" lights. There is no more information in those lights than you already get with the smartarray agents (SNMP, etc.) and other array tools. I don't know how other companies work, but the last thing on my list of things to do is physically visit ever server and watch the lights.


As far as these carriers being the "wave of the future," I've been in this industry WAY too long to get suckered into that marketingspeak. It's very disappointing. We will simply start moving to third party external arrays - the cost/benefit analysis doesn't support going with SmartDrives at super inflated prices. Did you also notice on the ML350 G8's for example, the 5 1/4" bays are also unusable without an additional bracket kit? This seems designed to make it more expensive to use third party drive cages. It's really sad when a company does this kind of thing. It's going to backfire.

 

To be brutally honest here, servers are becoming more and more of a comodity. Larger datacenters are starting to look at white boxes running virtualization and hot migrating VM's around when systems fail. When you can buy 2 white boxes for the price of one namebrand server with proprietary parts, well, it's a hard sell for HP partners. I've been an avid HP fan for ages, love the engineering, but this G8 proprietary move is a huge turn off.

Eurohost
Occasional Visitor

Re: ML350p Gen8 - Hard Drives, SBS and Controller??

Looks like empty gen8 hdd trays are finally hiting the market

Look for 651687-001

sfriedman
New Member

Re: ML350p Gen8 - Hard Drives, SBS and Controller??

Thanks for the part number for the SFF caddy.  Do you know the part number for the LFF caddy?

kkpro
Regular Advisor

Re: ML350p Gen8 - Hard Drives, SBS and Controller??

Hello,

This is an old thread, but I'll try to ask here.

We have several useless Gen8 500GB SAS drives, is it possible to use them in G6/G7 servers ?

I understand that the tray is another, but what if I'll buy p/n 373211-001,  is it stil available ?

MT11
Occasional Advisor

Re: ML350p Gen8 - Hard Drives, SBS and Controller??

The "old" G5/G6/G7 trays are widely available

I am willing to trade you your useless Gen8 LFF trays for a unused G5/G6/G7 LFF tray ;)