Skip to main content

HP D2700 enclosure and SSDs. Will any SSD work?



I've got an HP D2700 enclosure that I'm looking to shove some 2.5" SSD drives in. Looking at the prices of HP's SSD drives vs something like an Intel 710 and even something less 'enterprisey', there's quite a difference in price.



I know the HP SSD's will obviously work, but I've heard rumours that buying an Intel/Crucial/whatever SATA SSD, bunging it in an HP 2.5" caddy and putting it in a D2700 won't work.



Is there an enclosure / disk compatibility issue I should watch out for here?



On the one hand, they're all just SATA devices, so the enclosure should treat them all the same. On the other, I'm not particularly well-versed in the various different SSD flavours to know whether there's a good technical reason why one type of drive would work, yet another one wouldn't. I can also imagine that HP are annoying enough to do firmware checks on any disks and have the controller reject those it doesn't like.




For background, the D2700 already has 12x 300GB 10k SAS drives in it, and I was planning on getting 8x 500GB (or thereabouts) SSDs to create another zpool. Whole thing is connected to an HP X1600 running Solaris 11.


Answer



Well, I use a D2700 for ZFS storage and worked a bit to get LEDs and sesctl features to work on it. I also have SAS MPxIO multipath running well.



I've done quite a bit of SSD testing on ZFS and with this enclosure.



Here's the lowdown.




  • The D2700 is a perfectly-fine JBOD for ZFS.


  • You will want to have an HP Smart Array controller handy to update the enclosure firmware to the latest revision.

  • LSI controllers are recommended here. I use a pair of LSI 9205-8e for this.

  • I have a pile of HP drive caddies and have tested Intel, OCZ, OWC (sandforce), HP (Sandisk/Pliant), Pliant, STEC and Seagate SAS and SATA SSDs for ZFS use.

  • I would reserve the D2700 for dual-ported 6G disks, assuming you will use multipathing. If not, you're possibly taking a bandwidth hit due to the oversubscription of the SAS link to the host.

  • I tend to leave the SSDs meant for ZIL and L2arc inside of the storage head. Coupled with an LSI 9211-8i, it seems safer.

  • The Intel and Sandforce-based SATA SSDs were fine in the chassis. No temperature probe issues or anything.

  • The HP SAS SSDs (Sandisk/Pliant) require a deep queue that ZFS really can't take advantage of. They are not good pool or cache disks.

  • STEC is great with LSI controllers and ZFS... except for price... They are also incompatible with Smart Array P410 controllers. Weird. I have an open ticket with STEC for that.




Which controllers are you using? I probably have detailed data for the combination you have.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

linux - iDRAC6 Virtual Media native library cannot be loaded

When attempting to mount Virtual Media on a iDRAC6 IP KVM session I get the following error: I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 and: $ javaws -version Java(TM) Web Start 1.6.0_16 $ uname -a Linux aud22419-linux 2.6.28-15-generic #51-Ubuntu SMP Mon Aug 31 13:39:06 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux $ firefox -version Mozilla Firefox 3.0.14, Copyright (c) 1998 - 2009 mozilla.org On Windows + IE it (unsurprisingly) works. I've just gotten off the phone with the Dell tech support and I was told it is known to work on Linux + Firefox, albeit Ubuntu is not supported (by Dell, that is). Has anyone out there managed to mount virtual media in the same scenario?
Post a Comment
Read more

hp proliant - Smart Array P822 with HBA Mode?

We get an HP DL360 G8 with an Smart Array P822 controller. On that controller will come a HP StorageWorks D2700 . Does anybody know, that it is possible to run the Smart Array P822 in HBA mode? I found only information about the P410i, who can run HBA. If this is not supported, what you think about the LSI 9207-8e controller? Will this fit good in that setup? The Hardware we get is used but all original from HP. The StorageWorks has 25 x 900 GB SAS 10K disks. Because the disks are not new I would like to use only 22 for raid6, and the rest for spare (I need to see if the disk count is optimal or not for zfs). It would be nice if I'm not stick to SAS in future. As OS I would like to install debian stretch with zfs 0.71 as file system and software raid. I have see that hp has an page for debian to. I would like to use hba mode because it is recommend, that zfs know at most as possible about the disk, and I'm independent from the raid controller. For us zfs have many benefits,
Post a Comment
Read more

apache 2.2 - Server Potentially Compromised -- c99madshell

So, low and behold, a legacy site we've been hosting for a client had a version of FCKEditor that allowed someone to upload the dreaded c99madshell exploit onto our web host. I'm not a big security buff -- frankly I'm just a dev currently responsible for S/A duties due to a loss of personnel. Accordingly, I'd love any help you server-faulters could provide in assessing the damage from the exploit. To give you a bit of information: The file was uploaded into a directory within the webroot, "/_img/fck_uploads/File/". The Apache user and group are restricted such that they can't log in and don't have permissions outside of the directory from which we serve sites. All the files had 770 permissions (user rwx, group rwx, other none) -- something I wanted to fix but was told to hold off on as it wasn't "high priority" (hopefully this changes that). So it seems the hackers could've easily executed the script. Now I wasn't able
Post a Comment
Read more