Smart Array P400i non-hp disks

[Valtteri Kiviniemi]

Hi,

I have a 4 years old HP DL360 G5 with Smart Array P400i which has no warranty. Our original SAS-drives are getting slow and degrading and I was wondering that does the P400i support non-hp drives?

Does it recognise for example WDC or Seagate drives, or do I have to use HP drives? I have heard that non-hp drives would not work because the controller requires spesific firmwares.

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

[Bhavnish Kamboj (BK)]

Hi Valtteri,

They might work with your controller because I have seen in my case many customers sometimes use non-hp disks.

But once you plug the non-hp disks then be ready for unpredicted symtoms also. This doesn't happen in all the cases but you may be the lucky one if you get :-)

Better go for HP branded and compatible disks if cost is not a constraint.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hey, another problem you may run into is that the non hp-disk is too small (I believe the HP disks are very close to the same size - down to the byte).

[Valtteri Kiviniemi]

Hi,

It turns out that the non-hp disks that I'm using (Western Digital SATA 2,5 Scropio Black 320GB, WD3200BEKT) works just fine. Running now 4 drives in RAID10 and for some reason the performance is much better than with the default 10krpm 146GB SAS-drives. I'm having write/read speeds exceeding 200MB/s.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Nice! Are those disks 7200rpm? Sounds like good value for the money

[Valtteri Kiviniemi]

Hi,

Yeah, 7.2krpm. Seek times are of course a little bit slower due to the slower rpm, but still its pretty impressive for some laptop drives.