Smart Array 5300 & ML 570 G3

[todd bailey]

Hi All,

I just took delivery on a ML 570 G3 and haven't had time to read much of the documentation and online searches have not answered my question.

For some reason the machine complains when I install any of my SA 5300 series raid controllers. I tried a few different slots but the effect was the same.

"incompatible pci card in slot -xxxx system halted"

Is there a work around for this? I would have expected that any pci-x card should plug in and play.

Am I missing something or is this normal sop?

It has the P37 bios dated 4-28-2006

What if I wanted to install other legacy cards? will I have the same issues?

On a hunch I installed my only 6402 card and problem did not appear. But I'd like to use my larger collection of 5300 series cards.

Thanks

P.S. This thread has been moved from  Storage >Disk > Disk, Disk Arrays (Legacy) to ProLiant Servers (ML,DL,SL). -HP Forum Moderator

[thomasr]

I'm guessing that the problem is that the 6402 is indeed PCI-X, bu the 5300 is PCI64/66. It's possible that the ML570 does not support those 64-bit legacy PCI cards (but I don't know for sure without looking up the quickspecs, and don't have time just now).

[todd bailey]

Well that is the $200* question.
* avg ebay sa 6402 replacement cost... :)

I always thought that 64 bit pci was called pci-x, x for extended

On the back of the server reads
pci-x 64 133 and pci-x 100.

again, I always thought that the slots would auto configure to a common bus speed as determined by the installed cards.

The 5300 series states...
64-bit, 66-MHz PCI interface boosts bandwidth up to a 533 MB/s total transfer rate.

The 6400 states...
64-bit, 133 MHz PCI-X interface boosts bandwidth above 1GB/s burst transfer rate over PCI-X bus

I came across a few adaptec 64 bit pci/pci-x?) cards to experiment with

That might shed a bit more light...

thanks for the info..

[CyberWerx]

I had a similar problem and it turned out to be the BIOS in the HP server simply refuses to recognize "legacy" RAID cards in the PCI-X slots. Like you we found that the servers support the newer 6400 series RAID cards but not the older 5300 series. Like you we had quite of few of the latter which we wanted to continue using but in the end there was no BIOS update available from HP that would recognize the cards.

If I were cynical I would say this is HP's way of forcing us to buy new hardware each time the server chipset moves forward. The other side of the coin is HP can only invest so much in "legacy" support and have to draw the line somewhere.