Intel SSD in BL460C G1

[ekool]

I've got a rack full of BL460C G1 servers and I started swapping in some Intel SSD's.... I've got 1 running an Intel 320 SSD and 3 running Intel 512 SSD's.

The problem is that I've got a couple of seemingly identical BL460C G1's that will not accept the SSD's.. they aren't recognized. Swapping that same SSD to another blade works fine, so it seems there's something on those particular G1's that won't take them SSD's.

They are running the same firmware on the blades and RAID cards, so I have no idea what would cause the problem.

Does anyone have any guesses?

[ekool]

Bump, still needing help on this.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Same firmware even on both raid card, ilo and bios?
Are they not seen in BIOS or in OS or both? =)

Maybe there's a BIOS setting or Array ctrl setting that is different?

[ekool]

As far as I can tell, the BIOS never sees the hard drives at all, only the RAID card. Even on the machines that are working, the BIOS has nothing in there regarding hard drive detection, just the RAID card.

Yes, the firmware is the same on everything.

[ekool]

And I see what you are asking... the RAID card BIOS never sees the drive, and the OS never sees the drive. It just flat out won't detect the drive anywhere.

I can swap carriers all day, and no SSD will detect while other SAS drives will.

Despite other blades detecting those same SSD's fine.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Can you take an ADU report from a server where it's working and one where it's not and attach here? Would be interesting to see, but maybe you yourself can run some kind of comparison tool to see if there are any other differences..

[ekool]

I'm not sure what an ADU report is. Keep in mind, I run FreeBSD on our blades, so we have very limited software support on these boxes.

[Johan Guldmyr]

HP's array diagnostic utility.
There is a linux version of it, unsure about bsd.
It's also available on boot cds.

[Bart_Heungens]

You can start the Diagnostics tool and ADU by booting the server with a recent Smartstart CD...

[CorbettEnders]

eKool, are you concerned with the TRIM support in this scenario? TRIM is the ATA command that tells the drive to erase free blocks.  SSD drives need to erase before a write, and TRIM gives this performance benefit if pre-erasing known free blocks instead of waiting for them to be written to.