DL380 G7 with Corsair P128 SSDs

[karislove]

Hello I have 4 Corsair P128 SSDs that I would like to use in a server. I have been thinking about purchasing a DL380 G7 to use as a VM host.

The HP Sales department says they will work fine. Corsair tech support says they should work fine. HP tech support says they should work fine.

The reason I am a little shy is that I have run in to issues with 3rd party drives working in OEM servers.

Can I use the Corsair drives in the backplane of this server?

I know you may not be able to offer a definitive answer but any point in the right direction would be helpful.

If anyone has specific knowledge for this drive in particular that would be most wonderful.

Thanks

P.S. This thread has been moevd from Disk to ProLiant Servers (ML,DL,SL). - Hp forum Moderator

[Prokopets]

I just wonder: how are you going to plug this drives to hotplug backplane of DL380? As i can see, this SSDs have even no mount rails... And it's really strange that HP officially told you that this SSDs will work fine, if they aren't listed in official QuickSpecs of DL380 G7.

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello,

it will work, but I don't think that's supported. The SSDs don't have suitable rails for the ProLiant, so how do you want to connect them?

Regards,
Patrick

[karislove]

Thanks for the good tips. I have found a supplier for the trays required to mount the drives. The guy in HP sales said that the trays for the G6 and G7 are the same trays. I can find the trays for the G6 so I should be good. Unless of course the drive trays are, in fact, not compatible. In which case a tip on a source for G7 drive trays would be helpful.

[Ulf Sahlin]

Hi!

I have this EXACT issue. I would like to use (cheap) Corsair SSDs with my DL380 G7 boxes.

Where did you find the drive trays? Does HP have a part number for the drive trays?

Otherwise, one solution would (sadly) be to buy the cheapest HP 2.5" SFF SATA drives, remove the drive and insert the SSD drive in its place in the tray. I am unsure as to whether hot-swap actually works with this kind of setup, but I can live with having to power down my servers when replacing drives with the enormous cost savings I get buying non-HP SSD drives.

[karislove]

Ulf,

I am afraid there were to many unknowns and all I was finding was should and maybe not does and will. Not to mention the lack of participation from the HP user community concerning this particular thread. As you can see this post was from early July. We did end up using the SSDs but we utilized a Quadrapack enclosure with an Addonics card to drive them so we could bypass the OEM backplane. Also, the RAID cards capable of passing the TRIM command to the SSDs were outside our price range and since the only Windows server OS that can pass the TRIM command to the drives is 2008 R2 we ended up using a simple Addonics non-RAID card and utilized software RAID. It is not the best but we are seeing marked improvement in performance over SAS with half the drive count. At this point only time will tell if this solution will last out the year.

Happy computing.

karislove

[Ulf Sahlin]

Hi!

Thank you for your swift reply.

Yes I'm looking into using some 4x2.5" cage for a 5.25" slot (hence not DL380G7, possibly some rackmounted ML370).

1.) As you mention, I noticed most RAID cards do not support TRIM. What RAID cards did you find that actually does support it? I'd be happy if they were known-vendor stuff such as Adaptec or LSI.

2.) I assume you solution is to attach the SSD drives as JBOD and then use (Windows) software RAID? When attaching drives as JBOD, do controller cards (even RAID-capable ones) ALWAYS let the TRIM commands through to the drives?

3.) It would be interesting to know what sort of performance improvements you noticed using SSDs. I have MSSQL databases on RAID10 10k drives and I am experiencing % Disk Time at 300+ %, which is not good according to http://www.sql-server-performance.com/articles/audit/hardware_bottlenecks_p1.aspx. Hopefully SSD will alleviate this issue somewhat.

Ulf

[karislove]

Ulf,

1. I don't have specific model numbers as all that was scrapped when we moved away from that course. The engineer I spoke with at Corsair recommended an Areca and I believe that there are a few models of LSI that support TRIM passthrough.

2. I went with a non-RAID SATA controller because it allows the OS to see the hardware of the physical drive and therefore pass the trim command. If the RAID card only shows the virtual disks to the OS then the TRIM command would not even be sent by the OS because the OS is never told that the underlying hardware are SSDs. I believe that some RAID cards will tell the OS that the RAID card is fronting SSDs so the OS knows to pass the TRIM command. It still limits the types of RAID you use as RAID levels such as 5 are not supported on any card for SSDs.

3. I would not be able to speak to your situation. However, we are running an environment that is heavy on the reads and we have seen a 20-50% increase in speed on app load and file reads.

I hope this helps.

karislove