SA-P600 SATA HDD HCL

[nomadsole]

Is there any place I can find SATA HDD HCL for SA-P600. The following url lists all firmware updates for the supported HDDs. Does this effectly mean only HDDs in that list are supported by SA-P600?

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/files/storage/us/locate/99_6153.html

Also, is a specific firmware required for the HDD in order to be supported by SA-P600?

[KarloChacon]

here the list of HDDs suppoted by P600

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12247_na/12247_na.html#Options

regards

[nomadsole]

These HP branded HDDs are actually Seagate or Maxtor HDDs. So if we use the same model from Seagate or Maxtor, is it support by HP? Are these HDDs compatible with SA-P600? Do they need special firmware from HP to work with SA-P600?

Thanks

[KarloChacon]

1. it's not supported by HP... it's in your hands

2. yes if those are SATA yes, P600 supports SATA tech.
"Mix-and-match SAS and SATA hard drives, lets you deploy drive technology as needed to fit your computing environment."

3. no i think

regards

[nomadsole]

Thanks. I may try these configurations this week, and post the result back.

But it seems if you use an unsupported configuration with HP product and asked for tech support, they could come back and say you voided the warranty because of the use of a unsupported configuration. This also suggests that if you brough a SA-P600, and put it into a Dell server, and found SA-P600 might be faulty. They won't provide tech support, nor will they provide warranty, which is annoying from the customer's aspect.

[nomadsole]

Sorry for late. But here are the results. SA-P600 doesn't require specific HDD firmware to work with. Currently, we have 4 Seagate 320G SATA II drives (ST3320620AS) attached to the controller. The configuration does work. However, the controller shows:

1. the transfer speed is only 1.5Gbps.
2. NCQ is not supported.
3. the write caches on the physical drives are disabled but changable. But executing command ctrl slot=5 modify dwc=enable forced returns an error, saying it can be done with the current configuration.

There indeed are SATA II drives officially supported by SA-P600, such as DiamondMax 11 500G SATA II hdd. But do they have the same problems as my 320G seagate drives when used with SA-P600?

Besides, the write performance sucks when using RAID 5. IOMeter with 32K; 0% Read, 0% Random shows a stable write rate of 20MB/s or so.

The read rate looks ok, but not good enough. IOMeter with 32K; 100% Read, 0% Random shows a stable read rate of 66MB/s with 4 physical drives.

Btw, the stripe size is the defaul 64K stripe size. All windows partitions are aligned to 1MB. NTFS allocation unit (cluster) size is 64K.