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Can anyone confirm if they've successfully installed and operated the Kingston SKC1000H/960G PCIe SSD NVME card in an HP ProLiant DL380 G7 Server? If so, is it just plug-and-play? Does the extra capacity just become available as a new volume?

Despite being out of drive bays, we are looking for a performance upgrade on our SQL service and have had excellent experience with SSD drives in the past, but we have never used a PCIe solution before. (Suggestions for alternatives to the Kingston device would be welcome too if anyone has such experience)

Dave M
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Mac Anamourlis
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  • Hi Mac, just to mention it: This will never be officially supported by HPE. They only support configurations with products mentioned in their server QUICKSPECS. --> google for "DL380 G7 QUICKSPECS". So you can use PCIe SSD's but you have to buy the HPE supported ones... – frupfrup Oct 25 '17 at 14:24
  • Thank you @frupfrup, I realise it won't officially be supported, but will this one in particular work? As it is a PCIe add-on card, and bypasses the RAID controller and custom drive bays, I presume compatibility should be fairly straight forward? But I've been wrong before! ;-) – Mac Anamourlis Oct 25 '17 at 14:29
  • i think so too, but i never tried it before. And i've been wrong before too ;-) – frupfrup Oct 25 '17 at 14:32
  • What concerns me is this product I found called the OWC Accelsior S PCIe Adapter from https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075RS9D3X/ref=ask_ql_qh_dp_hza?th=1 which explicitly states: *NOT COMPATIBLE: HP DL 380 G7, HP DL 380 G8, Dell PowerEdge R620, Dell PowerEdge T620* which I find very odd since this seems standard and is well supported by most PCIe slots – Mac Anamourlis Oct 25 '17 at 17:43

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I've written about this:

Force renegotiation of PCI Express link speed? x2 card reverts to x1 width

Seriously...

But my recommendation for a good NVMe card is the Intel 750 PCIe card in 800GB or 1.2TB.

The Kingston will work, but will downshift to PCIe 2.0 speeds. The presentation to the OS depends on the OS and version. Do you have those details?

ewwhite
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  • Thanks @ewwhite I did read your post previously, it was helpful too. If I could find the Intel 750 locally, I would have gone for it, but I'm in South Africa and the local distributors don't always stock all products. I have a mixture of potential applications. Primarily we're looking at Windows 2016 Server and/or Windows 2012 and/or Windows 2008 R2, but possibly also XenServer - I also potentially want to use a DL380 G7 or a DL380 G8 – Mac Anamourlis Oct 26 '17 at 09:51
  • If I can get my hands on the **Intel P3520 PCIe SSD**, would that one work in the HP DL380 G7 and G8 servers? – Mac Anamourlis Oct 26 '17 at 11:14