HP P400 why so cheap on eBay?

[mattr]

I've used a lot of P400/P410 but only with RAID1. But from my experience they've been pretty solid and decent performance. Does anyone have experience with these cards configured in RAID5? I figure they must perform horribly in RAID5 or something since I can find tons of them in the $10~$15 range.

 

[dba]

I have a P410 with cache that I'm using (for non-critical data) in RAID5 with eight 1TB laptop hard drives. Performance isn't great, but it's much better than software RAID5 and much better than IBM M1015 RAID5. I don't have specific numbers because it isn't a system worth benchmarking, but I have been subjectively happy with the performance.

I've used a lot of P400/P410 but only with RAID1. But from my experience they've been pretty solid and decent performance. Does anyone have experience with these cards configured in RAID5? I figure they must perform horribly in RAID5 or something since I can find tons of them in the $10~$15 range.

 

[mattr]

Seems like a pretty incredible value. I believe the P400 is only 3Gbps but still... $10 for 512mb cache RAID controller and ~$30 for the 1GB cards... crazy. I'm going to pick one of these up just to play around with. Maybe end up being a permanent storage array.

 

[Patrick]

I have a HP P411 (external SFF-8088) 512MB w/ BBU sitting at home that I need to get on ebay or the FS section one of these days. Just almost not worth the hassle of having to list and ship.

 

[eziemann]

I have had a P400 running for 2+ years now. Using 7 x 2TB Hitachi 5k3000 drives in RAID 6.
Paid $63 for it with cache and battery then. The SAS cables were almost as much.
Performance-wise, it is fine for my home media serving.

The advantage of P400 is that it does not require a software key for RAID 6 like the P410 and newer ones do. It however only runs SATA drives at 1.5Gbps.

I just picked up 3 more this week plus 3 cables for around $20 a piece (13 for the card, 7 for the cable). Trying to fix some SUSE 11 stability issues that have Marvell on-board RAID controllers.

Just one gotcha, it has drive write caching disabled by default. You need to turn it on in the GUI or via CLI.
hpacucli ctrl slot=1 modify dwc=enable

 

[mrkrad]

Honestly I did a benchmark with raid-10 since I don't use the others much - and there was very little difference between the p400/p410/p420.

P400=ddr/pci-e 1.0 and LSI 1068e

P410=ddr2/pci-e 2.0 - pac sierra (flash back write cache option!)

P420=ddr3/pci-e 3.0 - pmc-adaptec (flash back write cache! hp smart path[fastpath], hp smartcache [cachecade 1])

Folks just don't understand hardware, and when they don't understand it , it becomes junk. So they spend money on M1015 and PERC 5/i when they could have gotten a much sweeter deal on a P400

I have no doubt that the cards scale better with other raid scenario's but with plain old drives, without ssd caching, the limits of the drives present far before the limits of the controller.

What counts to me is reliability first. I'll take 1.5GB sata - how many SATA hard drives really sustain that rate?

What i've learned over the years, skip sata for chrissake. Stick to SAS , it is so far superior it is not funny.

 

[RimBlock]

What is compatibility like outside of a HP server ?.

My P812 was 'fun' but, hopefully, mrkrad mentioned elsewhere why it may not have been performing in non-hp equipment as well as I would have expected.

RB

 

[mattr]

I found a thread on another forum talking about the performance issues with the P400 and that newer firmware seems to resolve those issues.

 

[dba]

I have a P410 with cache that I'm using (for non-critical data) in RAID5 with eight 1TB laptop hard drives. Performance isn't great, but it's much better than software RAID5 and much better than IBM M1015 RAID5. I don't have specific numbers because it isn't a system worth benchmarking, but I have been subjectively happy with the performance.

I found some early notes:

HP P410 with 1GB flash-backed cache. Seven (7) 2.5" Samsung Spinpoint M8 1TB drives (very slow laptop drives) in RAID5
Testing with IOMeter, queue depth=32, 4GB test partition size (much larger than the cache size):

4kb random reads: 1,350 IOPS
4kb sequential reads: 57,000 IOPS
4kb random writes: 1,100 IOPS
4kb sequential writes: 67,400 IOPS

1MB random reads: 265MB/S
1MB sequential reads: 778MB/S
1MB random writes: 107MB/S
1MB sequential writes: 374MB/S

 

[mobilenvidia]

Alternative to the HP P400.

LSI MR SAS 8708ELP $45 OBO
I think these come with 128MB cache.
And tiny little card with SFF-8087 connectors
All the RAID levels

 

[alex1002]

Can you post a link for these super cheap p410?

 

[mrkrad]

you know its like all deals, gotta snipe them when they are in least demand.

like the $66 m5014's (i've got a handful sitting in wrapper still) once they get popular the prices goes up. Have to move fast.

Right now i'd say the cheapest way to get one is inside a dl180 G6 since those 15,000 servers came with them

 

[cptbjorn]

I just negotiated for a dl180 g6 and the seller would only knock off $65 to leave the p410 w/ bbu out. Might try shooting some emails to the sellers to see if they'll give you a direct deal for around there

 

[mobilenvidia]

Best see what all this cheap fuss is about.
So on it way.
$20 for a P400 with 512MB, BBU and cables.
How can you go wrong with that.

BTW, MKRAD the P400 = SAS1078 not SAS1068, 1068 I think are PCI-X

Also deep in negotiations on a P800 8i/8e, 512MB and dual batteries
What an alliance back in its day, a SAS1078 with a PMC PM8388 expander all on one board
Would this happen today

 

[mrkrad]

man I've got a dl320s sitting around with a p812/512 fbwc and a one with a p800/512bbwc you can actually fit 3 bbwc on the board itself.

the batteries, are cheap to replace. google for battery options folks have rolled their own since its just a couple of cells similar to a cordless phone.. i'd never suggest buying used batteries but the circuit is on the board and its so easy to replace the battery with your own work imo.

p812 has two internal and 4 external if that means more to you. iirc the p800 had less external ports?

Great controllers never the less, RIS is forward compatible from x00 to x10 to x20 series. pulled a p400 out of a server and plopped the p812 in and esxi just saw the datastore as-is. Honestly in raid-10 not huge difference in speed with the drives I had though.

 

[mobilenvidia]

Not heard on the P800 yet, offered $30, if accepted I'll take it.
The P400 and P800 are of no use to me, as I'm running 2TB+ arrays
But just for testing and playing with.

But the P800 boards are huge, full length boards
It may not even fit in my case, I may have to run it on my open aired test system.
Batteries are little Lithium types, seems very small compared to P4x0 BBU's

P410's cheapest I've seen is $75 for zero cache
What are you getting them for ?

 

[mrkrad]

no the p400,p410,p420 all use the same battery. The P410/P420 do have a FBWC option which is a different cache board completely. those use tiny 5.4v two supercap's in what appears to be the same carrier as the original p410 bbwc.

What I would do is epoxy a heatsink/fan onto those chips. I've been burnt by the LSI chip literally. They get up to 200F under load.

They make a special epoxy for mounting a heat sink and then throw a little spinner on that for a desktop.

 

[mrkrad]

you can just great 1.9tb volumes and span them

Smart Array P400, P400i, And P800 Controllers - Maximum Logical Drive Size Capability Has Been Increased From 2.2 Terabytes (TB) To 8 Zettabytes (ZB)

Interesting.. So most folks use ACU and create a large span of disks, then carve up the disks into raid-10/50/60

might do raid-10 on the fastest tracks, raid-50 on the rest.

Each LUN gets QD32(~~) so you can get more IOPS with more luns carved up rather than per drive raid-set which is made using [f8] command.

 

[RimBlock]

Not wishing to derail but what about the Dell cards ?.

The Dell H810s look attractive at US$280 with 1GB NVRam on them. They are LSi 2208 based so could be a good alternative.

I have a H200e (8 lanes external) in my ASRock board for testing the Quanta DAS and have had no issues with it compatibility wise. How do the newer Dell Percs stack up for compatibility ?.

The H310 (LSI 2008) also looks like a good deal at around US$75 per unit (possibly the new M1015 ). The connectors come off the back rather than the top which may make a difference in tight locations.

RB

 

[mobilenvidia]

On that note how about a HP Smart Array P421/2GB FBWC SAS RAID Controller $365, only a $1 per day for a year.