DL360 G5 with P400i mixing SAS and SATA

[Per-Ola]

Hi!

I have a DL360G5 with a P400i controller running RAID5 on 3x146GB SAS disks. This works great.

Now I have purchased two 500GB SATA (507750-B21) disks to use as extra storage. I was planning to configure them in a RAID1/mirror setup. Before purchase i checked that the disks are compatible with the server and that the controller also supports SATA.

When trying to do this the server doesn't detect the SATA disks in the Array Config Utility. But if I remove the SAS disks it does!

I have read here somewhere that mixing should be ok, even in the same logical RAID volume...

What is the problem?

Controller FW ver is 5.20 and BIOS is P58 09/29/2008

Best regards

Per-Ola

[Michael A. McKenney]

LSI Logic does not recommend mixing SAS and SATA on the same controller. Most of the controllers I have seen from HP lately came from LSI Logic.

[Ali]

hi Per-Ola,

what is the placement of these drives?

I see the latest firmware for SA400i controller 7.22 (25 Oct 2010)
and
system bios 2010.10.25 (B) 11 Jan 2011 available to download which has lot of critical fixes.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodNameId=3288144&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=1121486&swLang=8&taskId=135&swEnvOID=1005#29214


So, as a best practice, first step would be to update system bios and controller firmware before putting the new SATA drives in.

As per quickspecs, mix and match for SATA/SAS is supported.
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12400_div/12400_div.html

SATA and SAS drive should be part of seperate logical drive.

hope this helps,
thanks
Aftab

[Michael A. McKenney]

LSI Logic supports it but does not recommend doing it because of communication issues. I would be careful mixing drives. I would not put them in the same arrays.

[Per-Ola]

I will try, fw updates and see how it goes. And I never intended to use mixed drives in the same raid/logical drive.

/Per-Ola