Proliant DL180 G6 SATA drive capacity

[Chris Headrick]

Can someone tell me.  Is the server limited to 1TB SATA drives? I currently have 2 bays in RAID 1 and the other 10 in RAID 5. All the drives are currently 1TB. I'd like to know if its possible to change over the 10 RAID 5 drives to 2TB drives?

The pdf I read indicates

Up to 14 hot-plug LFF SATA 7.2K rpm 1 TB and 750/500/250/160 GB.

This server only has 12 that actually show in RAID Mgr.

Also, can I use SATA-600 or do I need to go back with SATA-300 like the one is I've already pulled out?

thanks 

[viniciof]

Hello Chris,

According to your configuration it's for sure you're using a P410 controller or similar on this server.  That controller will support higher disks (firmware will allow that so please check it's close to las version or latest).  Actually I can see some 3TB SATA LFF drive options for this server in the quickspecs:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/productbulletin.html#spectype=worldwide&type=html&docid=13248

There are also some options for 6G but only in SAS drives, for SATA drives all seems to be 3G.

[Chris Headrick]

Yes I checked the raid card and its runing:

P410   Firmware 3.6    512 cache

So looking at the doc link you sent it looks like anything running fimware P212 to P800 will work.

I dont see where if I can add an external Fiber HBA card to attach to our SAN if desired. Is that possible?

[danda]

Dear fellows i have 4000gb*12 i know it sounds crazy 

i want to make 2 arraysone 4tb raid 1 and rest raid  5 

when i do smart start it show me 275 error code the p 212 controller was congigured on higher version tool 

so i went through bois to make raid i was able to do it

but when i start installation mbr have limitation in first array i am getting unallocated space of 1678 gb and cant do anything with that neeed ur help plzzzzzzzz

[Sbrown]

So you need to update to latest firmware first.

To boot an array that large you will need GPT and UEFI bios mode.

So if you don't know this. never build array with the [f8] key, use ACU from the SPP DVD (or acucli).

then you build an disk set with all drives, then you create a logical raid-10/5/6/0 out of say the first 200GB for o/s.

Next you build a second 2TB, 3rd 2TB, 4th 2tb (esxi max partition is 2tb) or one big huge 14TB raid-50. Your choice.

This allows an MBR boot of < 2TB so windows will be happy and install and boot from LEGACY BIOS mode. Once the o/s is loaded it will be glad to format the rest of the area with GPT full 14TB but i am not sure that is wisest! your choice.

[f8] mode only lets you make disk base raid. ie drives 1-2 in raid-1 and drives 3-12 in raid-50

ACU lets you build all 12 drives, then carve out lun's boot raid-10 across all 12 drives, mad storage raid-60 across all 12 drives, then super scratch disk on the outer sectors that are fast raid-0 across all disks!! this is the way to go! and it will let you have your cake ad eat it too!

Does that make sense? If you build the raid with [f8] bios mode, you will not be able to do logical raid lun's!! you must always start with ACU!

That way you get the speed of all drives for all volumes!

You can alter the strip size (128K is way too big!) and create FAST raid on the fastest tracks of the drive (short stroking!) and put your swap or log on that area.

The only controller that does this with bios [f8] is the E200 which is a big hunk of lsi junk.

I use the P420/1GB FBWC with 4 SSD for HP Smartcache on the DL180 G6, and 12 drives of 2tb !

750GB of SSD read-only cache makes those 12 2TB drives super fast reading with 0% chance of failure and no degradation since the 12 drives are on a separate raid wire.

The P420/2GB FBWC can do 1.5TB of SSD cache!! so you can have that 48gb of drives with 1.5TB of hot ssd caching for read!

Folks will say it's not supported, but what HP means is the controller runs too hot and has poor heatsink but the DL180 has huge fans and will cool the controller properly and function 100% even with advanced P420 SAAP 2.0 SMARTCACHE feature! tested in windows 2012 and ESXi 5.1u1 !

You can get a $15 riser on ebay to give you on the left 3 slots 2 x8 and 1 x4 - you can then put QLE8152 $99 dual 10gbe nic in x4 slot, and two OCE10102 emulex HBA $99 (ebay) in the other 2 x8 slots for a total of 6 10gbe nic!

Now you tell me who is crazy? 48TB with 1.5TB of SSD read cache with P420/2gb FBWC and 6x 10gbe nic plus 6-core cpu and 48gb of ram will make a very very very powerful storage server!

Dude was selling ebay dual L5630 Dl180 G6 for $450 !! you sell the two L5630 for $200 each, buy two L5520 for $25 each and voila! $100 DL180 G6 server with redundant power supplies, P410, and 8gb ram!! :)

DL180 dual L5520 $100
96gb of ram $540
P420/1gb FBWC $249 (seriously google it!)
HP SAAP 2.0 key $249 (per server not per card like LSI)
Qle 8152 SFP nic $79-99 ebay
(2) Emulex oce10102 $79-99 ebay ($160 total)
1 riser (2x8 1x4) $20
12 RE4 SAS 4TB drives !! $450 * 12 !!

Fastest fileserver ever!! FTW !!

[Chris Headrick]

Thanks Sbrown. Took a while to read all that. I called HP support Wed and they told me my current configuration will support either 2TB or 3TB disks. I will probably look at ordering 10 3TB disks. This server has just 12 LFF slots. 1 and 2 are currently 1TB disks in RAID 1 for the OS.  So my plan was to leave that as it is for now . Replace the other 10 1TB disks with 3TB disks, GPT and RAID 5.  I willl check on the firmware update as well.

[Amuzed2pieces]

Sbrown,

according to HP docs they only support Smart Cache on a Gen 8 or newer server, have you tried this on a Gen 6?  Its seems silly to limit it G8 but that is what they say.