Performance Experiences with HP P420 w/ 2GB Cache?
- Thread starter ItsChrisG
- Start date
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For what server will you be buying them?
P420 is capable of about double what it is advertized at. can hit 450k iops...
They run hot, need good server airflow, and you have to disable option rom in non-hp servers to keep them from hanging the system.
They are tied into ILO heavily and hang the system waiting for ilo to respond. That said, just keep the option rom from running... and you are good to go.
P420 is capable of about double what it is advertized at. can hit 450k iops...
They run hot, need good server airflow, and you have to disable option rom in non-hp servers to keep them from hanging the system.
They are tied into ILO heavily and hang the system waiting for ilo to respond. That said, just keep the option rom from running... and you are good to go.
iirc I think they are around 25w ... they run hot because they are passively cooled. They outperform the LSI cards of the same gen by 30-50%
If you really want to have stuff fly... P430 can do 1m iops...
Honestly I would get 1 or 2 cards and verify they work as you need them to work before deploying a lot of them. They are truly great cards... just developed solely for HP servers.
If you really want to have stuff fly... P430 can do 1m iops...
Honestly I would get 1 or 2 cards and verify they work as you need them to work before deploying a lot of them. They are truly great cards... just developed solely for HP servers.
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They are bloody quick.
I made a sticky awhile back on this...
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/hp-pmc-sa-in-whitebox.4732/
The main downside right now is not being able to run m.2 and them...
I'm crossing my fingers that I can get them to work on SM boards - specifically X8DTU-F (for immediate purposes) and be able to boot off them like normal. Maybe the latest firmware from June 25~ will get it to work, if they dont work as-is on receipt. :S
I'm running a p822 and a p420 on an asrock workstation board (c226ws) I dont have to disable the option rom as the card will post correctly, but I cannot access the card rom (ORCA) as no shortcut (F8 etc) is presented as i think the HP hardware is probably required, but they do work as they should and as Patriot says.. they are quick. I have the 2gb FBWC version running the latest firmware hooked up to 12x 2gb ultrastars 7k3000 and i'm seeing read and writes of 1.5gb/s on 32gb file size (crystaldisk) and if you bring the file size down to 4gb reads jump to 2gb/s and writes stay around 1.5gb/s
Most of the initial issues I had looked to be caused by a dodgy rom chip on the motherboard.
Without access to ORCA i cannot boot from the drives (not an issue for me though)
Steve
Most of the initial issues I had looked to be caused by a dodgy rom chip on the motherboard.
Without access to ORCA i cannot boot from the drives (not an issue for me though)
Steve
I literally spent ~ 18 hours ****ing with the HP P420 and trying to get it to be bootable on a Supermicro X8DTU-F (so many different possibilities attempted) -- no luck and 18 man hours gone.
I ended up having to flash the firmware 6.x and also create the array/vd by plugging the card into a machine with an Intel DH67BL motherboard (I can access ORCA fine on this motherboard) while having the drives attached via the SAS cable BUT POWERED VIA the backplane of the 1U server that the card is going in permanently (so the array/vd is built using the permanent/actual physical drives).
Then I disabled PXE Option ROM for that PCI-E slot in the Supermicro BIOS and added a drive to be used as the O/S drive -- installed the O/S and using the RAID array as a secondary/data/VM partition.
Works fine - and performance is GREAT, and overall, its actually better to have stand-alone OS drives from your RAID arrays.
I ended up having to flash the firmware 6.x and also create the array/vd by plugging the card into a machine with an Intel DH67BL motherboard (I can access ORCA fine on this motherboard) while having the drives attached via the SAS cable BUT POWERED VIA the backplane of the 1U server that the card is going in permanently (so the array/vd is built using the permanent/actual physical drives).
Then I disabled PXE Option ROM for that PCI-E slot in the Supermicro BIOS and added a drive to be used as the O/S drive -- installed the O/S and using the RAID array as a secondary/data/VM partition.
Works fine - and performance is GREAT, and overall, its actually better to have stand-alone OS drives from your RAID arrays.
Well, it would have just worked in an HP server... but you reserve the right to whatever opinion you wish to have, no matter how flawed ;p
These cards were designed in house for use in HP servers and were never tested outside of them.
Yeah, but my statement was not just because of this one RAID card incidence.
All experiences with Dell and HP are complete shit and time sucks.
I would pay someone $1000 USD if they coded a customized/fixed firmware for the HP P420 that enabled it to be used as a bootable disk on Supermicro servers 
(or provided a fix for the Supermicro BIOS to work with the HP P420 BIOS/firmware)
Any bad asses around?
(or provided a fix for the Supermicro BIOS to work with the HP P420 BIOS/firmware)Any bad asses around?
I'm fairly sure the original firmware I had didnt work very well either i think it was 3.22 but I just automatically updated to the latest at the time.. I think patriot has mentioned that they seem to be improving compatibility with other boards due to the recent licensing deal. I certainly did not spend 18 hours getting it running.. but I spent far more than that chasing a stupid faulty bios chip that wouldnt allow the system to warm reboot and caused odd varying performance issues on the raid array, but was 100% stable in running! Maybe I should have gone Supermicro (seem impossible to find in Oz tho..)
to quote from another thread
Interesting note... As PMC has licensed Smart Array from HP for the next 10yrs... it will be easier to use Smart Array cards on White boxes in the near future... and adaptec cards will suck less...
It would also be worth adding your thoughts / experience / config to the whitebox sticky for future reference
(seem impossible to find in Oz tho..)to quote from another thread
Interesting note... As PMC has licensed Smart Array from HP for the next 10yrs... it will be easier to use Smart Array cards on White boxes in the near future... and adaptec cards will suck less...
It would also be worth adding your thoughts / experience / config to the whitebox sticky for future reference