Raid Card Question

[Jonathan Alstead]

I have a lp1000r and have a spare PCI slot which I would like to put in a netraid 1m card but due to cost I am looking at putting in a third part card.

Can anyone suggest a competitive alternative?

Thanks

Jon

[Greg Carlson]

Jon,

If you have hp hard drives installed, then I would only install a netraid card. If you have OEM equipment and put in a third party array controller, you'll end up with higher drive failures due to firmware mismatches. You should be able to pick up a HP NetRaid 1m or 2m on ebay for pretty cheap now though. You can also buy them from http://www.pmount.com

Ciao,
Greg

[Jonathan Alstead]

Which part of the firmware will fail, the card or drive. If both are oem does firmware come into it?

If I turn the question around. Will a netraid 1m be tolerant of oem drives (fujitsu) as the drives are oem?

Thanks

Jon

[Greg Carlson]

Jon,

Its not a question of which firmware fails.. If you have firmware incompatabilities, you'll have communication failures resulting in drives dropping offline and failing your array. If you have HP hard drives, then use the netraid controller so that you can ensure you have matching fw. If you have third party hard drives, then hopefully a third party controller will have compatabile fw for those hard drives. Obviously the recommended and most reliable solution would be HP tested hard drives and netraid controllers. Also since that LP1000 still probably has another year of warranty at least, the hp netraid hard drives and controllers would be covered under the server warranty.

Ciao,
Greg

[e4services]

Where did this information about Firmware come from? FW mismatchs?
Jon,
From our experience you certainly can go ahead and replace your RAID controller with one of the new U320 or even the U160 RAID card. Then you can upgrade your drives to U320 and get some advantage from the replacement

[e4services]

Now lets address this "OEM equipment" statement. Most HP accessories are "OEM equipment" by the true definition. HP buys the products from another manufacturer and outs their name on it. Mylex, now LSIlogic, originally made the NetRAID cards. The hard drives, Hitachi, Seagate, IBM and Quantum all were used. The companies sell HP an OEM product, a product made for another manufacture to include in their manufactured product with a warranty supported by product it goes into.
We like to use the term "rebranding" instead. So to call Hitachi drives, "OEM equipment" is a miss use of the term, actually the exact opposite. You are actually using a non-OEM product, not an HP product. What you are loosing is the system testing that goes into the HP rebranding. HP stands behind your server as a system, testing each component the rebrand to function properly in there system, so they can guarantee to you the ability to plug and play each an every part.
Sorry, but as an engineer, I hate the miss use of acronyms. We spend so much time thinking them up

[Jonathan Alstead]

Sorry for the late reply but I am a bit confused when the previous post says that the card can be U320. I thought the chip on the motherboard would control the speed of the scsi device which is U160.

Does the card bypass allow drives of U320 to run at U320 speed or will it degrade gracefully to U160?

Thanks

Jon