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Re: B320i controller: Side effects of enabling physical drive write cache state

 
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DevOps_PB
Occasional Visitor

B320i controller: Side effects of enabling physical drive write cache state

I have an HP ProLiant DL360e (G8) with B320i controller. I want to enable physical drive write cache state.   It seems easy to do this from the HP Smart Storage Administrator | Modify Controller Settings.  My two questions are about the side effects.
1)  Does this force a rebuild of the drive array?  Cannot live with this!
2)  Does it require a reboot?

4 REPLIES 4
Jimmy Vance
HPE Pro

Re: B320i controller: Side effects of enabling physical drive write cache state

This option enables using the onboard cache on the hard drive. I doubt a rebuild or a reboot are required. With this option enabled, if the server looses power you will have data corruption on the drive

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DevOps_PB
Occasional Visitor

Re: B320i controller: Side effects of enabling physical drive write cache state

Thank you for the quick response.  Caching does not take place on any drive.  Per the HP documentation, the B320i is an optional device that plugs into the motherboard.  We have the optional 512 MB FBWC with battery backup.  If the server looses power and the FBWC works as advertised, there will be no data loss or corruption.

Additional facts:  

Four 7.2 K 1 TB SATA drives configured as RAID 5  (Yes, SAS would be faster)

OS is Win 2012 R2

Firmware/device drivers updated to the latest in the patches in service pack for proliant 2014020B  with one exception.    HP ProLiant Dynamic Smart Array RAID Controller Driver which is at version 6.6.2.64  per HP support recommendation

 

It would be great to get a response from someone familiar with th B320i.

Jimmy Vance
HPE Pro
Solution

Re: B320i controller: Side effects of enabling physical drive write cache state


@DevOps_PB wrote:
 

It would be great to get a response from someone familiar with th B320i.


I'm pretty familiar with this and most HP Smart Array controllers.

 

You question was about 'physical drive write cache' and not about the battery backed cache module on the controller. In your original post you didn't mention you had the optional cache module. With the optional module you can adjust the ratio of the read/write cache memory of the controller.  This is still different than 'physical drive write cache'.

 

Take a look at page 2 of this document for more information

 

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c02278484

 

 

 

 

 

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DevOps_PB
Occasional Visitor

Re: B320i controller: Side effects of enabling physical drive write cache state

Thank you Jimmy for the very informative link!  Since this is a dev/QA env, we will proceed and post any issues encountered to this thread.