P410 vs P800 vs Other

J

jacknorris

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Oct 22, 2011
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Im looking to build a nas box soon however I am currently unsure on which controller to choose.

A HP P410 (8port) and HP P800 (16port) can be found for around £300, I've heard the P400 works well in non HP systems but I haven't really heard much in regards to the P800. I'm guessing the P410 is faster than the P800 judging by the price + ports.
Ideally I would like RAID6 support. This comes as standard with the P800 but the P410 requires the HP Advanced Licence Pack which will probably add on another £200 to the price.

Has anyone had any experience with these controllers or could perhaps recommend a better alternative? I have noticed that Areca is mentioned quite alot on here, but those controllers cost £400+ are they any better than the HPs ?. I will be adding an expander into the mix later on so this may be something to consider.

Thoughts and suggestions welcome!
Thanks
 
I have a P410i w 256MB BBWC in my HP Microserver. Had some initial issues with the firmware on the drives. But with the latest firmware on the controller and drives everythings runs like a champ.
 
Well, if you're going to need to connect up to a disk shelf, you'll probably want the P800 as it's got the external ports. I'd recommend using a filesystem on your NAS that will take care of your raid for you and just JBOD the disks. If Linux, look into btrfs, if Solaris look into ZFS.
 
Thanks for replies :)

I have been flip flopping between using hardware raid + WHS 2011 and some sort of software based raid. ZFS looks interesting but i'm not so sure about being unable to expand a RAIDZ2 array. I know that I could pool another RAIDZ2 array to increase space but with HDD prices increasing it's going to cost a fair bit just to create another array of comparable size rather than increasing it steadily as needed over time.
 
I'm running a Windows based home file server with a HP P410, mainly because I had some experience with HP Smart Array controllers already and because the P410 is 100% compatible with the HP SAS expander I intended to add to my system at a later date.
Looking back I would probably have been better of with an Areca controller.

The 'problem' with the HP is that there are very little options to tweak and it is quite slow in expanding and rebuilding.
My main issue however is that it is impossible to see the SMART data of the individual drives. I'm running with 2TB Seagate drives and by now I know exactly where to look for in the SMART data to spot a badly behaving drive (command time outs). That is simply not possible with the HP controllers.
 
PS: The P400/P410 do not support a true JBOD mode - in case you want to use ZFS.
 
On a reasonably related topic....

A friend of mine described the HP P400-series controllers as pretty much worthless at RAID5, incapable of handling even moderate loads.And that P800-series is the one to go for. I am new to the area myself, but would love to get a second opinion on this.

Anyone care to comment on this statement?

Would the addition of 512 or 1024 MB of cache to the 400-series make things even or is it the processor that makes the difference?
 
Most raid controllers perform very badly without additional cache memory, as do the HP Smart Array controllers.

This is the current performance of my 8x 2TB drive (Seagate ST32000542AS), RAID5 array on a HP Smart Array P410 controller with 512MB BBWC cache:

9uvthx.jpg


This is with the array cache set to 25% read, 75% write (the default I believe) and the cache on the individual drives turned off.
As you can see the results are far from spectacular, but enough to saturate a Gigabit network connection.

Edit: I just looked back at some older benchmarks I ran while still configuring and testing my server and with a 4,5, and 6 disk RAID5 and RAID6 setup I was seeing read and write speeds in the 160~180MB range with the array cache set to 25% read, 75% write and the individual drive cache turned on.
 
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Morning! My first post in [H]ard|Forum :cool:
and sorry for shitty english, not my native language.

Several years ago i benchmarked pair HP controllers P600 vs P800 15k1 hp Savvios with various drive configurations on my Tyan k8we system.

Here is results that i got with IOMETER.....
Sequential workload 10drv P800:


4drv P800


Sequential 4drv P600 vs P800 R0 R10 R5 R6
___

WS, FS and DB pattern P800 10drv and 4 drv configurations


 
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