My home lab has a pair of HP G6 ML350 servers. Each has a Smart Array P410 w/ 1gb cache RAID card. The card is not on the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) for ESX v6.7 and newer; it might not even be approved for v6.5 considering the fiasco I had with them previously. These cards will not see 4k drives, some people claim they will see drives larger than 4tb if the drive is 512e. That being said, I thought I'd try upgrading the RAID card, as the prices are very reasonable on the second hand market. I purchased a used Smart Array P430 with 2gb cache from eBay. These cards will do 4k drives, have a faster processor, supports for 12gb SAS, more and faster cache, and is supported by newer VMware versions. Here is some of what I discovered.
-The Smart Array P440 has a wire that connects the cache module to the motherboard. The battery for that cache module has a cable connecting to the motherboard. So unlike nearly all RAID cards, that RAID card can't easily be used in non-supporting systems.
-The Smart Array P430 & P440 are almost identical. In fact when physically looking at the cards the only way to tell the difference is to look for stickers or silk screening. The cache module physically swaps between the two; I haven't tried the older cache module on the new card to see if it will function or not.
-Putting the Smart Array P430 into a HP ML350G6, all drive LED indicators go away. Thus I have no way to tell physical drive activity or if a drive fails.
-Newer HP RAID cards give the option to boot into the cards ROM soon after post. Where as older card, boot each item separately then giving the option to go into that ROM. IE my G6 when booting, I have to wait for it to finish posting, then ILO, then the RAID card stuff comes up, at which point I press F8 to configure the RAID card. On a newer machine say a HP G8, once one sees the "Sea of Sensors" page one can press the function key to get into the RAID card's ROM. Here is an issue, putting the P430 into my HP G6, I never see the message to get into the RAID card's ROM, at no point during the posting process do I see press a Function key to configure. When the RAID card "boots" I do see a "press Escape to continue" but that is it. This makes it incredibly hard to look at virtual, logical, and physical drive(s).
The work around, albeit a crummy one.
-"Offline HP Smart Storage Administrator (HPSSA). It is a bootable ISO, newest version is v1.50(4b) CIRCA 2013. It does allow one to manipulate the RAID card as one would expect.
-HP Service Pack for Proliant (SPP) This is the bootable ISO meant to upgrade firmware on a ProLiant Server. I tried the one for a G7. It doesn't find any firmware to update, not even the RAID card. However that same SPP includes Storage Administrator, which is a few revisions newer than the offline version.
Swapping the RAID card was easy. It should also be known that these RAID cards use a special-ish cable. It has one internal x8 wide mini-SAS port. The P430 automatically imported the logical drive. In my case I have a pair of 4tb SATA drives in a mirror, the new card just accepted it without any input from me. I did run a quick benchmark on a VM that lives on that volume. It was a tiny bit faster, not much can be expected as the two 5900rpm SATA drives is the bottle neck.
