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I have some needs to get cheap HP 1U for very low end purposes. I'm thinking about DL160 but I have no experience with the low end models.

Does the H240 "controller" works with SATA drives? I would like to max it out with 4 LFF drives with 2x RAID1. Does it support HW RAID1?

Thanks W

ewwhite
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Billy K
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3 Answers3

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I'll direct you to the user manual and product guide. https://www.hpe.com/h20195/v2/getpdf.aspx/c04346303.pdf

The H240 Smart Host Bus Adapter provides flexibility to run in HBA mode or simple RAID mode. When operating in simple RAID mode, it provides RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 5 with optional HPE Secure Encryption capabilities. Unlike the HPE Smart Array Controllers, the H240 does not offer any acceleration or support cache modules.

The Smart Array H240 is compatible with SATA disks and it is capable of hardware RAID for the setup you're describing.

ewwhite
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  • Thanks. Sounds good. I have the P series every where, but I really need some low end HW RAID to make sure OS drive is mirrored (so no OS driver BS) with cheap SATA. Even it is not accelerated, it is fine. – Billy K Oct 11 '16 at 13:28
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Spooler is incorrect. It it a (low end) hardware RAID. Its on a VMWare certified list which only qualifies hardware RAID

Brian the IT guy
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Yes, this will support SATA and SAS drives. It doesn't really do hardware RAID, though. It uses a FakeRAID controller, which doesn't perform any kind of offload or battery backed caching. It also requires the use a specialized driver to maintain any RAID abstractions.

This essentially equates to all of the drawbacks of software RAID with all of the drawbacks of hardware RAID. I would generally advise to not use it, and use software RAID instead. Software RAID will have better metadata handling, better interfaces, and cross-system portability.

This controller will pass all of your drives directly through to the operating system, which in the case of a software RAID is what you want. This is true of both Windows and Linux, though the software RAID capabilities of Linux would be generally preferable.

So in summary, just teat it as a non-raid controller to avoid issues. OR if you need a hardware RAID controller use a higher end product, such as the H700 series.

Spooler
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