ml350p: p420i replace with H220 for not using raid but ssds

[mwindham]

I'm new to HPE products, and I have purchased a used ml350p which I plan to use sata ssds. It will come with a P420 and it would seem the H220 might be a good choice for HBA mode. Can I remove P420i if not to be used?

[Torsten. · Accepted solution]

you cannot remove the P420i, but you can switch it to HBA mode.

[mwindham]

Thanks for letting me know I can't remove. I asked after reading 

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/p420i-and-ssds.21817/

and further in the thread

"The SA P420 is pretty good raid controller, but sucks in hba mode. It does not do smart passthrough and as far as I can remember performance suffers a lot.

Good and cheap hba for gen8 servers is the H220, which is LSI 9205 or 9207 based."

I presume that I could boot from one of the 3 sata connectors on motherboard, and either use P420 as hba mode or raid 1?  Or maybe add an H220 while leaving the P420?

[rmay_bk]

What OS?  I've used the P420i with two different SSDs: The Intel 730 and the Crucial MX500.  They worked fine.  I was running VMware ESXi and it wouldn't let me create datastores on ANY drive (even HP OEM SAS 10k drives) with the P420i while in HBA mode.  No problems in normal RAID mode with each disk provisioned as a single drive RAID 0 "array."

Edit: I was doing this on a DL380 Gen8.  At one point I connected the MX500 SSD to the onboard SATA optical drive port and it started corrupting data.  Not sure if I have a faulty port or if there's a timing issue with using an SSD on a port designed for a slow CD-ROM.  If you try something like this, be careful.

[mwindham]

I was hesitant to go raid 0 because of  its striping. Raid 1 seemed to be best choice if I had to use P420 as it gave some protection but doubled cost and power. I tend to use for data sm863(a), sm865, and Micron 5100/5200 MAX used with reasonably low hours and writes.