P400 smart array won't detect any SATA Drives!

[Torsten.]

Do't get me wrong, but this is part of the game: HP gives you a list about the supported environemnt, in this case a list of servers, disk enclosures and disks.
Anything not in this list is not supported, so it may work or not.

[Guy McNeill]

Can anyone else help me with this? Is anyone else experiencing this problem?

It can't be the BIOS of the motherboard as the card 'boots up'. But I've tried 4 different 1TB SATA HDs now and they all just don't work?!!! None are detected. Please, can anyone help?!

[cnb]

As Torsten pointed out, the P400 is designed to work with specific HP systems with HP BIOS, certain HP system slot configurations, HP disk drives with HP firmware, drivers and cabling. Anything else outside of the supported configuration matrix may or may not work.

I'm just curious as to the part number on your controller. The P400i is an embedded controller, whereas the the P400 is a plug-in PCIe controller.

Which system and motherboard are you using?

Can you run ADU and post the report?

You might want to contact the Vendor where you bought the P400 and cable to see if they can help.


Rgds,

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello,

I have a P212 with the latest firmware and no problems with Hitachi SATA disks. Can you attach an ADU report?

Regards,
Patrick

[Guy McNeill]

Hi all,
thanks for your help. But i've given up and sold the card and bought a better LSI Logic one which supports 3gbps SATA anyway (instead of 1.5gbps).

Shame as I was a real HP fan, but this whole "Only support HP drives" thing does my head in. When manufacturers like Adaptec, LSI Logic and Areca can all make cards and guarantee they work with SATA Hard drives (generic) I don't see why HP can't.

I've seen plenty of posts online where SATA drives were working but after firmware upgrades to the card they were no longer detected. Presumably nasty HP execs said to pull generic drive support at a point in the firmware to ensure people bought their branded drives (which are exactly the same, just with their firmware).

HP, if you're so generous, why don't you provide the firmware to people to flash their generic SEAGATE, SAMSUNG, HITACHI drives if you HAVE to have the SATA running supported firmware?

Thanks all anyway.

[Gruic]

I have a DL380-G4 with a P400 pci-e controller.  From my experimentation, it seems to accept any 2.5 SAS drives, but will not see *ANY* SATA.  I've tried numerous models of Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital SATA drives on the backplace, all without luck.  One comment -- I am not sure if the backplane in my DL380-G4 actually supports SATA, but everything I've read seemed to indicate that it should.

As far as I'm concerned I will not purchase any vendor's equipment that uses bios/efi to lock down the hardware environment so you're forced to buy their overpriced OEM parts.  I should be able to accept the risk of using (considerably cheaper) third party components, often which are almost identical to the OEM branded ones.  Third party warranties are often superior as well, such as Crucial's lifetime memory guarantee.

Kudos to IBM for letting me run any memory/harddrives in their systems.  Kudos for Dell for the same thing, however Dell had to learn the lesson the hard way when they locked down their PERC6h controller in the Dell R510s.  There was such an outcry from the dell user community, they then released new firmware that opened the controller back up to accept any drive.

Just my two cents on this topic.  If anyone figures out how to use standard SATA 2.5 laptop drives with a P400, please share it with the forum, you'll be a hero!

[Alexander_Lowen]

if you read the specs carefully,you'll see this :

'

Maximum Internal
Storage
Hot Plug SAS 4.0TB 8 x 500GB with standard internal hot plug SFF
SAS drive cage
Hot Plug 2.0TB 8 x 250GB

'

the p400(i) only supports up to 500gb per drive

[joshuahanley]

I figured out how to do this on a P400 Smart Array, but you need at least one SAS drive connected to the RAID controller but not part of any virtual disk (RAID volume) in order to get the controller to admit it can see the SATA drives (even though it obviously recognizes them during the controller boot up in POST).

In my case, I had three SATA SSDs I needed to use to replace a failed 3-drive RAID 5 (2 SAS disks died and we lost the RAID). I wanted to put the SSDs in RAID 5 just like the SAS drives had been. 

When I pulled the two bad and one good SAS HD, swapped all three SATA SSDs in, booted to the RAID controller, deleted the failed virtual disk, and tried to create a new virtual disk, the controller said no disks were available and I couldn't proceed. When I swapped out one SSD for the good SAS HD I had, booted back into the controller, and selected New Virtual Disk, the controller recognized both the SAS and SATA drives. I put the two SATA drives into a new RAID 1 virtual disk, shut it down, and swapped out my SAS HD for the third SATA drive. I booted back into the RAID controller, selected New Virtual Disk to confirm it could see the third SATA drive, then deleted the SATA-based RAID 1 virtual disk, and was able to successfully create a RAID 5 virtual disk with all three SATA drives.

[Darkside59]

Hi, 

I know this post is old. Just wanna see if you got it to detect. There's 2 mode on that controller. HBA Mode and Smart Array Mode. Plus you need HP latest SPE Smart Storage Administrator, aka HPSSA. If the controller is in Smart Array mode. OS will not detect any drives, but will show up in HPSSA as "Unassigned Drives", and in order for Windows or any OS to detect the drives, you have to create a Logical drive by creating a Raid, then your OS will see the drive. If you don't want to raid and just use as a single drive. Go back to HPSSA and switch it to HBA Mode and reboot system. Windows will see the drive/s

[amanosalva84]

I have the same issue with my p400 card but changing the  cable molex it work with generic disc, the new cable is HP PN 451375-001, Replace with Spare 457892-001. good luck!!