HP ML110 Mixing SATA & SAS

[colinmitton]

I have a little HP ML110 coming with 2 SAS drives in, Initially I'm going to use it as a temporary unit while I swap out and upgrade a few servers, once they are done I plan to use it as a test box and bulk storage of old files.

I was thinking of adding a couple of extra drives but when I saw the price of the SAS drives for the cost of the unit and its purpose I thought about adding a couple of SATA drives using the internal array and mirror them. Cheaper and more space for the money.

HP does not 'recommend' doing this but I was wondering if anyone else has done this and if its caused any issues?
For those wandering I would put the OS on the SAS drives and use the SATA drives for storage.

 

[JimInKS]

I just did something like this on a ML 350 G6.
I am using it to record IP cameras and need quite a bit of storage. HP wants something like $900 for a 2TB drive. The only slight difficulty I had was getting the drive caddies, supposedly HP does not sell them alone anymore. I didn't get mine from provantage, but here is their link to them:

http://www.provantage.com/acp-ep-memory-373211-001-aa~7ACPN0Y5.htm

the HP part number is 373211-001-AA.

Anyway, I bought 5 WD 1.5T caviar black drives for about $100 each. I was originally just going to use them as JBOD but decided i would go ahead and set them up as RAID 5 and see what happened. Have been working flawlessly for about 3 weeks now.

I know WD and Seagate have drives that are supposedly "Enterprise" drives and are often rated to be used in RAID configuration. Maybe I am just unlucky, but I have had nothing but trouble with these class drives and they cost about twice what the "consumer" drives do. So far I have not had any failures with WD Black drives.

My real servers with user data on them are still HP SAS drives, but I was willing to risk this as if I have a major melt down I will just have lost my recorded video.

 

[colinmitton]

Thanks for the reply, the ML110 range does not need any caddies thankfully! I'm going to put an order in to my local supplier for some SATA drives at least someone has done it which gives me some hope!

Thanks

 

[mattjonesits]

Curious to know how you got on.
We put some SAS disks into to the unit (which had SATA) and it had all sort of weird disk performance problems.

(It was a Windows Server 2003 machine running MS Exchange for a small office. We since upgraded them to SBS).


Matt Jones

http://www.theitsolution.co.uk

http://www.theitsolution.co.uk/london-it-support-computer-repair/it-support-london.html

http://www.theitsolution.co.uk/index.php/phone-systems-london.html

 

[colinmitton]

In the end for this system I sent with just Sata Drives as the on-board controller could handle 4 HDD and 2 CD-Roms all on SATA. I used the SAS controller on a different unit.

I did hear from a friend that mixing them around gave some strange perfoprmance issues so I just kept clear of it in the end.

 

[colinmitton]

I would also add that if you have certain processors on these Servers you must update the BIOS! I had loads of issues to start with on this server and found the the processor needed a update its worth a double check on the HP support site.