P408i-p battery in non-HP server

[Defjam]

G'Day all. Apologies if this is in the wrong place.

Building a Windows Server, Non-HP system but bought a HPE P408i-p card and a HP SAS expander. The doco for the P408i-p says to buy a battery to enable cache amongst other things, the 96W Smart Storage Battery, which I did.

The issue is the battery only connects to an HPE board and not to the P408i-P battery cable. Is there anything I can do here? I don't want to have to return the HPE cards (RAID and SAS expander). Raised a case and got told that the battery doco doesn't state it only works in HPE servers but essentiually bad luck on that.

Looking for any bright ideas? I assume the HPE card is an LSI? Is there a battery pack that might work there maybe?

Lots of work gone into the system and now would need to get refunds and restart it all.

Thanks in advance for any help.

j

[Jimmy Vance]

The P408i is not an LSI card.   The older Smart Array controllers had a connector on the card for the cache battery. The newer controllers are setup so one battery can provide power to several controllers so the battery plugs into a spot on the system board. 

[Defjam]

Thanks for that, there is a smaller battery connector on the bottom of the card and I had assumed that connected to the battery. And the doco doesn't state that these cards are only for HPE servers.

Without the battery what is the potential impact?

[Torsten.]

In these systems the battery connects to the system board and via a small cable from the riser card to the add-on controller card.

Without a battery you won't have a protected write cache.

[bilbazafa]

Hi,

I'm just wondering what you did in the end as I'm in the same position as you. It would be good to get an adapter to be able to plug the battery into the RAID card.

Cheers

[Torsten.]

I would always prefer a completely supported solution. Who should help you in case of trouble if every part of the server comes from a different vendor? This would be a nightmare.