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I have some fresh out of the box HP Proliant Generation 8 servers which have the HP 420i disk controllers built into the motherboard. Once upon a time the disk controller was a PCI card but now in Gen 8 Proliant it is on the motherboard. Regardless of this feature the controller seems to be unable to detect third-party disks.

HP sells a pile of disks with their brand name on them but they do not have 2TB SATA in the 2.5 inch format however Seagate does. So I have about forty disks that are the ST2000NX0243 disks. These are Enterprise SATA disks with 2TB and are 4KB sector size. They should be ideal for storage, however the HP 420i controller shows zero physical disks installed.

I called HP tech support with the details and they were quick to hang up the phone as soon as they heard these were Seagate disks and not HP's customised and enhanced Seagate disks. Is there anything here that I can do or just buy an Adaptec disk controller or are the new HP Proliant servers really unable to handle big 4KB sector sized disks?

Chopper3
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user284315
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1 Answers1

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You can't buy enterprise equipment (HP ProLiant) and just toss random components into the box and assume it will all work. Really.

  • What have you tried so far? You didn't indicate any error or POST messages from the server.

  • I wouldn't be using SATA drives these days for a variety of reasons, but performance and consistency are real issues.

  • You went into this knowing HP didn't sell the disk capacity you wanted. There may be a reason for that. Does that mean you found generic Gen8 disk caddies/carriers to install these 2TB drives? If so, those could be a problem.

  • 4K-sector disks DO work in ProLiant servers. I don't think this is your issue.

  • What actual model of server is this? A DL380p Gen8? DL380 RAID controllers have been embedded into the motherboard since 2002 (DL380 G2).

  • Have you upgraded the firmware on the system and components; specifically the RAID controller? (The current version is 6.34) - That's important, especially if the present controller firmware predates the introduction of the 2TB disks.

  • Did you use the HP Smart Storage Administrator utility to check the array configuration, or did you only use the BIOS Option ROM Configuration for Arrays (ORCA) menu? If the former, please show the output of the controller configuration.

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ewwhite
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  • You can put commodity disks into HP servers, up until Gen8. I still have a bunch of Gen6 servers with OCZ Vertex 3 and 4. SSD availability for Gen6 servers is pretty much nonexistent, there are a 60GB and a 120GB disks, end of story. – karatedog Apr 18 '16 at 15:00