[Info-vax] 3rd party SATA SSD usage on RX2660+P400 in a production environment?

[Hans Bachner]

Stephen Hoffman schrieb am 02.07.2019 um 00:48:
> On 2019-07-01 20:34:42 +0000, Hans Bachner said:
>
>> [...]
>> Btw, these drives are available with 2 TB capacity as well, if you
>> don't want to use a RAID controller.
>
> Cool.  I didn't see that HGST was offering small disks.
>
> The web searches turned up for that string were capacities way past 2 TB
> and variously out past 10 TB.

I found them starting at 300 GB in 10k and 15k variants (HGST Ultrastar 
C10K1800 and C15K600).

> And I checked the p812 specs and docs again, and don't see any
> indication that the p812 supports storage partitioning.  Based on the
> specs and the doc, the logical drives are all seemingly as big or bigger
> than the constitutent drives. Lots of support for "bigger" and for
> adding and swapping spindles in arrays, but unless there's something
> buried in the advanced features or some other add-on, I don't see
> anything akin to the FC SAN virtualizing controllers and their pools of
> sectors.  Did I miss that?

I don't have a P812 around, but the default P400 controller in the 
rx2660 supports partitioning:

> MSA> show controller
>
> Adapter: _PKB0: (DEFAULT)
>    P400             (c) HP                         PAFGK0L9SW90CY Software 7.22
>    Port Address: 50014380-021c71b0
> Supported Redundancy Mode:   Not Available.
> Cache:
>    52 megabyte read cache   156 megabyte write cache
>    Cache is GOOD, and Cache is enabled.
>    No unflushed data in cache.
> Battery:
>    Battery is fully charged.
> MSA> sho disk 1
>
>  SAS device                                              [Disk]
>  Disk 1: bus: 1, Target id: 7, Port: 2I,  Box/Enclosure: 1, Bay: 1,  size 68.37 [73.41]GB
>   Disk 1, # 0, size 20964825 blocks, (10.00 [10.73] GB), Unit 6.
>   Disk 1, # 1, size 41929650 blocks, (19.99 [21.47] GB), Unit 7.
>   Disk 1, # 2, size 80414727 blocks, (38.34 [41.17] GB), Unused.
> MSA>

The P400 quickspecs don't explicitely mention storage partitioning 
either, so the P812 may or may not support it.

So at least with the standard P400 the big SAS disks may be an 
alternative for the OP - if the low bus speed (3 Gb/sec) is sufficient.

Hans.