Server Raid Array is eating hard drives! (HP ML 370 G5 - Smart Array P400)

momeNt

Diamond Member
Jan 26, 2011
9,290
352
126
Hello all,

About 6 months we had replaced about 4 drives in total across our two raid 5 arrays. IT consultant suggested upgrading server, so we did, it was a huge pain in the butt and I ended up having to finish the job because he had quit. Now that we had the new server up and going, I was hoping to salvage and re-purpose the old server to something light duty and non-critical given that it is out of warranty.

We have an 8-bay drive cage with a P400 controller. I noticed that when I put a drive into the 5th bay, the indicator lights go on, but HP ACU won't recognize that a drive is there. We left our server with a faulted drive (bay 6) of our secondary raid 5 which consisted of bays 6-8. I put a drive in bay 5 and tried to assign that drive to the second array but it wouldn't recognize. I took out the drive in bay 6 and reinstalled both drives in bay 5 and neither were recognized. I installed the new drive in bay 6 and it began rebuilding the array.

I was looking into replacement raid cards and that model is around 700$. Replacement drive cages are much cheaper (can only find G6 and G7 model cages though). Is it common for the drive cage to maybe cause drive failures? Or should I be looking at maybe the controller exclusively?

Any ideas would be helpful, thanks in advance.
 

tomt4535

Golden Member
Jan 4, 2004
1,758
0
76
I would suspect the controller. There really isn't much to the backplane, but it could possibly cause an issue. Usually, there is a HP spare part # on the part itself somewhere which should be easily searchable to find a replacement part. Ebay is a good place to find cheap HP server parts:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-412736-0...62791?pt=US_Server_Boards&hash=item53edd23887


http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_sop=15&_nkw=hp+hp+p400

It looks like you should be able to get both parts for under $100, so I would just replace both and possibly even the cables just to be safe.