HP Smart Array P410 boot loop

[hunterjwizzard]

Hi folks,

I am attempting to install an HP Smart Array P410 RAID card in my workstation. Eventually I plan to boot off of a SAS RAID array on the card, but since I haven't got the cables to hook it to the drives yet, I thought I'd simply pop the card in and boot windows off of the existing drive hooked to the motherboard.

However, the machine is not booting. It posts fine and goes to a screen where the HP Smart Array P410 initializes, detects no drives, then goes back to the POST screen. I can't even access the BIOS, it just goes through that loop infinitely.

Is this happening because there are no drives hooked to the card?

The system specs are as follows:

Asus Z10pe-D16-WS
2x Xeon E5-2643 v3s
64gb RAM(2x 32gb)
nVidia GTX 1070

Currently there is a 4tb SATA drive(only 2tb partition) from which windows 10 pro is booting. There are also 2 other SATAs in the system. The new RAID controller as I said does not have any drives attached. I HAVE the drives, but haven't yet received the cable needed to attach them to the new RAID card.

 

[mysy]

p410 is very old module for HP Gen7 server, it doesn't use LSI chipset. I don't suggest you use it without HP server. You could get other LSI 2308 chipset HBA or 2208 Raid card in very chep price. I use them with asus z370 MB with no problem.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Ahh. That would certainly explain why the card was only $10. Well, you know, when they say something is too good to be true...

Do you happen to have a specific card you can recommend? I definitely want hardware RAID, I had been having some trouble identifying cards that weren't software.

Has anyone reported any problems with cards coming from china? seems like if I want one from anywhere else I had better be ready to pay three times as much.

Thanks!

 

[mysy]

I use the P410 with 512M cache for my N54L G7 server, but I sell card about 15 USD... I hear a lot that HP card doesn't work with other MB because the driver and chipset bootrom.
If you want to use Raid , you could get a read RAID card with cache. I use P420 with 1G cache in my G8 server, it real have speed up with 1G cache.
So you could find a cheap price for LSI 2208 card with 512MB cache or 1G cache. I see price about 120~200 RMB yuan from taobao and xianyu.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

I found some pretty decent prices on Amazon for somewhat newer cards with 512mb cache, think I'll pull the trigger on one of those. I found some nice inexpensive ones on eBay but they won't get here for ~2 months. This system refresh is rapidly becoming much more expensive than I had planned. Then again... they always are. What else can ya do, right?