Using SAS and SATA drives simultaneously with Smartarray P400 controller

[Alex_389]

Hi!

I've got DL380G5 server with P400 smartarray controller.
It has two ports.
I'm wondering it is posiible to use SAS drives on the first port and SATA drives on the second?

Regards, Alex

[Erdogan Temur]

yes. sas and sata can use together.

attached instruction manual for details.

[ONCBON]

Hi,
According to all the manuals and the P400 specs this should be possible... but:
I have a Proliant ML350 with 6 LFF drive slots and an internal E200i controller.
The first RAID 0/1 set are 2 SAS disks in the first 2 slots.
The second RAID 5 set are 4 SATA disks filling the other slots.
This configuration works but I got very bad write performance on the SATA disks. Even after firmware upgrade of the controller and the disks + activating the cache on the SATA disks.
So I wanted to try the P400 controller to see if the performance was better. After switching to this controller, everything appeared to work fine and I was getting 11MB/sec transfer speed. But after an hour the server crashed and it was reporting crashed hard disks, first the 2nd SAS disk + the first SATA disk. After taking the disks out and putting them back in, rebuild started but a short while later other disks reported to be "broken". I switched back to the internal controller and the disks were rebuilt and worked again.
It thought it could be a broken P400 controller. So I tried with another P400, installed the latest firmware and got the same problem after 30 to 60 minutes.
According to all manuals this should work but in my case, I get a crashed system.
I still found no solution for this config.
I hope you have more luck but I thought I would warn you.
Regards, Bartel.

[Alex_389]

Thanks for your replies.
I'll by one HDD for testing purposes and post results here