P420 Smart Array compatibility with 4TB SATA drives

[chuckk281]

Steve had a question about drive support on the HP Smart Array controllers:

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One of my customers has some DL380e servers with P420 1GB controllers. They currently have 3TB SATA drives installed but want to expand to 4TB drives. P420 is running F/w 5.42.

I did some research on compatibility and while the DL380e & P420 quickspecs both say the 4TB SATA is supported, there is a note in the SATA drive specs saying –

NOTE: To support HP hard drives exceeding 2.2TB, HP Smart Array Firmware version 5.0 or later is required for the following controllers:

    HP Smart Array P212 Controller

    HP Smart Array P410 Controller

    HP Smart Array P411 Controller

    HP Smart Array P711m Controller

    HP Smart Array P812 Controller

To use hard drives exceeding 2.2TB, you must create a boot volume using offline ACU version 8.75 or later. HP Smart Array controllers do not support boot volumes exceeding 2.2TB. Other controllers are not supported.

Does this mean that the P420 doesn’t support 4TB drives or is this just badly worded? The drive in question is 693687-B21.

And will the P420 support 11 physical drives (1 x 500GB, 6 x 3TB, 4 x 4TB, all SATA LFF)  each drive as a single RAID 0 LUN ( 11 LUNs )?

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Reply from Will:

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Hi Steve,

Please see the specs below:

4TB SATA See Capacity - http://h41302.www4.hp.com/km/saw/view.do?phpId=ods_na-php5193414&mode=php&docId=emr_na-c03223666&oid=5193414&title=HP+Smart+Array+P420+Controller

Number of Logical Volumes, See Logical Drives Supported - http://h41302.www4.hp.com/km/saw/view.do?docId=emr_na-c03223446

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Comments?

P.S. This thread has been moved from BladeSystem >Server Blades to ProLiant Servers (ML,DL,SL). - Hp Forum Moderator

[waaronb]

For anyone interested, including the original questioner, the limit on boot volume size is just that... a limit on the *BOOT VOLUME*.

That's not the same as a limit on total drive size, size of individual physical drives, etc.

Windows, for example, has it's own limits on boot partition sizes too which you should be aware of (with BIOS systems...UEFI has different limits, but that's applicable in the Proliant world starting with Gen9 boxes).

The simple answer is, if the controller handles 4TB drives (and the P420 does, I guess), then you can add them just like any other drive, but make sure you don't set the boot logical volume larger than what it says the limit is (2.2 TB or whatever).  You probably won't find yourself wanting a boot drive that large anyway... chances are, you'll have a much smaller logical volume for your OS.