Proliant ML350 G6 - Circumventing the p410i embedded RAID

[TheFuzzyFish]

(see bold sentence at the bottom for TLDR)

I've had my HP Proliant ML350 G6, running Proxmox Virtual Environment 5.2 set up over the p410i controller configured to RAID5, for a little over half a year now, and so far I've been fairly satisfied. However, I recently made the decision to move away from hardware RAID as a precaution against hardware failures, migrating to a more convenient, open-source software RAID alternative called ZFS, which Proxmox natively supports.

After a frustrating weekend of sitting on a concrete floor staring at this board trying to figure out how to disable/uninstall/circumvent this RAID controller, I concluded a few things:

• The controller cannot be physically uninstalled. It is embedded into the board
• With my specific backplane, which connects all 6 of my SATA drives and concatenates them into 2 SAS cables, the only place to plug them into the board are the 2 ports that belong to the p410i controller
• The p410i has no JBOD or HBA passthrough mode (for my motherboard anyway, though I heard that some other servers released by HP have this functionality)
• Manually wiring each drive with its own SATA data and power connection would be a major headache, especially considering that the power supply is the hardest component to get to with a case installed

Soo I was at a loss of what to do, and actually gave up for a period of time until the thought occurred to me: "Wait why don't I just install a separate SAS controller on one of the PCIe slots" (as if this was a novel idea that shouldn't have occurred to me immediately).

So I did a bit of reading and found the SAS9211-8I, which is... like, exactly what I'm looking for (which was frustrating to find after spending well over 12 hours trying to figure this out to no avail).

The problem is that this is a $100 card. So now to my actual question:

Is there a way to implement this (pretty basic) JBOD functionality without dropping $100 on a separate hardware component?

P.S. Don't you dare tell me to set up each disk as a separate RAID0 volume. I'm trying to avoid HP's proprietary hardware so that, in the event of an emergency, I can just snag my drives and expect to be able to read them later without any special hardware.

[Jimmy Vance]

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@TheFuzzyFish wrote:

The problem is that this is a $100 card. So now to my actual question:

Is there a way to implement this (pretty basic) JBOD functionality without dropping $100 on a separate hardware component?

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Simple answer, no there isn't.

As you have discovered the Smart Arrays of that era did not offer the ability for pass-through / HBA mode.   Even if you opt to try this add-on card there is no guarantee the system will boot from it.   

[TheFuzzyFish]

I hadn't even thought about whether or not the system would boot from this module. I thought that I found the part listed under a compatibility list yesterday, but I can't find it.

Does anyone have any experience with this part, or any other similar part, with this particular board?

[Torsten.]

What some people do in such case is to create a RAID0 on each of the physical disks - this gives you the "HBA-mode", more or less.

The P410 can do native HBA mode, but it is only supported in Integrity server environment.