P440ar, HBA mode problems

[tdeneau]

I inherited some DL360 systems which had P440ar Smart Array controller to which the OS drive and 7 data drives were attached.

My workload was a Software-based storage one (Ceph) so I really wanted the data disks to be JBOD.

I first configured the P440ar into HBA mode and I saw all the disks, and things basically worked but this was definitely not functionally stable when running Ceph benchmarks. (Note: I didn't encounter any
other disk-related problems, for instance when running Google stressapptest with disk based threads).

When I then configured the P440ar into 8 arrays of 1 disk each, with RAID 0 mode on each array, it worked fine, with no functional problems running Ceph benchmarks.

Why would HBA mode have problems? When I configure HBA mode on the P440ar, do I still have to do some setup on the embedded array controller on the system motherboard?

[Jimmy Vance]

I haven't heard of any issues running in HBA mode. No other setup is needed once you change to HBA mode.  You do loose the use of the cache module in HBA mode.