HP Smart Array P420 in non-HP host hardware?

[daimyo]

Hi folks,

I have a custom built dual Xeon workstation on a Supermicro X10DRI mobo and am now trying to pick a SAS controller for future HDD expandability.

My best option for my budget for now is an LSI 9261-8I 512 MB and because the HP P420 comes at a good price, I wanted to ask whether anyone has tried a HP Smart Array P420 in a non-HP machine? I am new to server hardware and have zero experience with RAID controllers and configurations.

Thanks

 

[Whaaat]

I wanted to ask whether anyone has tried a HP Smart Array P420 in a non-HP machine?

My experience is limited to HP H240, but I was surprised to find that it doesn't have its own bios configuration utility onboard. In non-HP machine you can configure it only by booting from a flash drive with the configuration manager corresponding to your MB chipset generation. Even more, I found that I can boot from this card installed in a consumer MB (MSI), but sometimes after hot reboot MB BIOS skips the H240 initialization procedures and hence doesn't find bootable drive connected to H240. On the contrary, Dell T7810 BIOS doesn't show H240 as bootable under any circumstances. You can install OS onto it - bootable media detects drive connected to H240 correctly, but after installation mobo refuses to show it in the list of boot options. Except of those issues everything else seems to work correctly.

 

[daimyo]

My experience is limited to HP H240, but I was surprised to find that it doesn't have its own bios configuration utility onboard. In non-HP machine you can configure it only by booting from a flash drive with the configuration manager corresponding to your MB chipset generation. Even more, I found that I can boot from this card installed in a consumer MB (MSI), but sometimes after hot reboot MB BIOS skips the H240 initialization procedures and hence doesn't find bootable drive connected to H240. On the contrary, Dell T7810 BIOS doesn't show H240 as bootable under any circumstances. You can install OS onto it - bootable media detects drive connected to H240 correctly, but after installation mobo refuses to show it in the list of boot options. Except of those issues everything else seems to work correctly.

Sounds like booting OS off an NVME drive
Thanks for the reply. I think Im gonna settle with an AOC-S2208L instead.