0

I have an HP DL320s server with HP Smart Array P400 raid card. The server is quite a low spec, but I am only using it as a storage server so I don't need much. It has 12 hot-swappable bay backplane. Now all bays are occupied with 750GB drives, so 9TB in total.

What I want to know is what is the max. size of individual HDD with the P400. I did not get a lot of information on this since the hardware is quite old. However, I know that with firmware update v2.08 or something around that the controller got virtually unlimited LOGICAL drive size, which was before limited to 2,2TB.

What I always failed to find was any information about max. HDD size. I want to use 2TB or 4 TB drives for expanded storage which would give me 20TB or 40TB in RAID6. But I don't wat to go out and buy 12 drives each around 100+ $/€ only to not have it working.

Another question I have is which RAID card would you recommend to replace the P400 and still work with my backplane.

Thank you for your time and recomendations!

Jan
  • 21
  • 5
  • It may be possible to add in > 2tb drives with the new firmware, but 2tb drives would be a much safer bet. (I vaguely remember massive performance issues with a server of that age - although I can't recall if it was a Dell or HP one with drives over 2TB - 2TB being a "magic number" for large drive support. – davidgo Nov 18 '19 at 04:35

1 Answers1

1

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/205899-smartarray-p400-and-3tb-hdd would seem to confirm that even with the new firmware, the maximum drive size recognized is 2TB - Depending on the firmware you can buy bigger drives but they will be seen as 2tb only, so its best to only go for 2tb drives unless you are willing to take a risk to short stroke them for better performance - but then again this would not seem to be a high performance setup.

davidgo
  • 6,222
  • 3
  • 23
  • 41
  • Than you @davidgo. I will probably go for the 2TB drives. I should still get 20TB with raid 6. I do not need any higher performance because the raid card is not that powerful, to begin with, and I don't even need any high performance. I just need it to work and be somewhat reliable. Thank you for your help. I struggled to find any reliable information on this topic. – Jan Nov 19 '19 at 20:06