DL380G5 with P400 or P600 ?

[KL Wong]

We have a DL380G5 server come with P400 disk controller, we only have 8 SAS drive so each of them has its own channel.

Noticed there are other disk controller like P600, P800, etc, etc.

Under what circumstance we need to consider use other disk controller other than the default P400 ??

Rgds/KL

[Mark Matthews]

The default storage configurations for the DL380 G5 are as follows, depends what you ordered...

Performance Models
Smart Array P400 Controller with 512MB battery-backed write cache (RAID 0/1/5/6)

Base Models
Smart Array P400 Controller with 256MB cache (RAID 0/1/5)

Available upgrades: 512MB memory module for RAID 0/1/5/6, battery for battery-backed write cache (BBWC).

Entry Models
Smart Array E200 Controller with 64MB cache (RAID 0/1)

Available upgrades: 128MB memory module for RAID 0/1/5, battery for battery-backed write cache (BBWC).

[SPa]

One of the important difference which I can see is the External port which is available in P600 and P800 as mentioned below:

P400 : Eight (8) SAS physical links distributed across 2 internal x4 wide port connectors

P600 : Eight (8) SAS physical links distributed across 2 internal x4 wide port connectors and 1 external x4 wide port connector. One of the internal x4 wide port connector shares 4 physical links with the external x4 wide port connector. When the shared internal x4 wide port connector is in use, the shared external x4 wide port is disabled

P800 : Sixteen (16) SAS physical links distributed across 2 internal x4 wide port connectors and 2 external x4 wide port connector

Therefore,incase you want to connect an external storage,you may want to go for suitable controller.

One more difference is P600 is a PCI X controller where as other are PCI Express.