DL380 G3 with SmartArray 5i (Not 5i+)... Possible?

[RLIAA]

I've got a rack of Proliant DL380 G3's and discovered that they contain a mix of Smart Array 5i's and 5i+'s (the 5i+'s exhibiting better performance than that 5i's based off of RAID 5 duplication of discs).

I also discovered the 5i+'s were paired with 3.2 GHz Xeons while the 5i's had 2.8 GHz Xeons. I swapped the CPUs just to see if it would affect the performance. For a RAID 5 disc copy, the 5i+'s were still about twice as fast as the 5i's.

Now, according to HP's specs, the DL380 G3 with a Smart Array 5i should not exist.

Is there anything that would cause this to happen?

All of the servers are running at the same firmware versions (P29 with v2.76)

Thanks.

[PGTRI]

hi,

The 5i comes with 32MB memory and the 5i Plus comes with 64MB memory.

more cache = better performance

regards,

[RLIAA]

All of the servers had 64 MB cache.

I figured out the problem:

Many of the servers we got did not have the Battery Backed Write Cache for some reason. This measn the controller wasn't able to use the write cache and thus, reported itself as a 5i even though the controller also reported 64 MB cache.

The inability to use the write cache caused the performance impact.

You'd think the controller would report a missing battery rather than just change its model number.