P410 on HP DL380 G5 problems

[sorin_pop]

Hello
I know this may sound really common and there are threads about this of how P410 and HP DL380 G5 don't work together but I had some spares around and tried to see what I can make of it, so I installed a P410 in a HP DL380 G5 and gave it a go.

At first everything seemed to be OK so I was wandering if anything had happened with firmware updated (both DL380 and P410 have the latest firmwares available for them), but than strange things started to happen, but to get there I should tell you my config. The P410 has a 512MB BBWC + SAAP license (for RAID 6) installed so I thought to give it a go like that. I just added 4 WD 750GB drives and everything appeared to be ok. To connect the P410 to the HDD backplane I used 2x SFF8484 to SFF8087. So I created a RAID 6 using the 4 drives and installed ESXI 5.1 a go to see how will it handle this (the HP version with hpacucli).

So with this setup I realized something is odd as the lights on the HDD expansion card came online (and everything was ok with P410). Than I checked the PHY Transfer Rate and it was 1.5Gbps which I thought to be odd as P410 is a 6Gb for SAS and 3Gb for SATA. But the most problematic part was when I started to copy a large VM onto the array.. at that point 1 drive failed and another failed after 20 mins, so I removed and reinserted one failed HDD and it worked but another one failed, than I removed the newly failed one and another one failed and so on untill 3 disks failed and the whole array failed (which I can't say I did not expect after the first unexpected HDD fail).

If anyone has any idea of how can I fix this? (if it's fixable). My only thought is that the DL380G5 has a Bus Width X4 and the Connector Width X8 for slot 1 (where the old P410 used to be) and for all the X8 connectors so it might be related to speed but than the card should slow down (this is just a guess as I haven't inserted the card in the x16 slots at all)

So I will be waiting for all kind of sugesitions regarding this if anyone has any.

Update 1: I tested the controller in another computer and it reports the PHY Transfer Rate: 3.0Gbps and I tried all the slots in the DL380 G5 and all of them reported PHY Transfer Rate: 1.5Gbps So in the end I guess it's related to the PCI Express bus width as on the other computer the drives did not fail at all. (might be a firmware issue as well)

Update 2: So the DL380 G5 has a PCI Express x8 1.0 and the other computer has a 2.0 and I guess that is why the PHY Connection speed difference, but I still don't understand why the drives failed in the first place. I was thinking if there is any raiser cards PCI-Express 1.0 x16 to 2.0 x8 (with some kind of chipset that will make the switch/translation) but I could not find any on the web (only pin to pin mapping ones)