Western Digital red 3tb drives + HP P410 - ISSUE

[Peter929]

Hi All

I've got an issue which is really frustrating me,

I've just got myself an HP ML110 (quad core Xeon / 16GB), a HP P410 raid controller, and 3 * western digital red 3TB drives.

The plan being to create a RAID 5 array across the 3 drives to give me circa 5.5TB useable.

However the raid controller is not playing ball,

On boot it recognises the drives, however at 0.0GB

When I launch up the array config utility, it states that the physical drives are not supported on this firmware.

I've had a good look and I cant see that it states the current firmware level anywhere, which is annoying.

Looking on the HP website for the latest firmware, its got me confused

Im also struggling to find doc's as to the actual upgrade process (ideally without needing an OS installed).


There's other people with the same raid card and drives, and the card is supported in the ML110 so shouldn't be the issue.


Thoughts?

 

[Peter929]

So a firmware update seems to have solved my issue

I have now been able to create a raid 5 array across the 3 * 3TB drives and can see it in the bios

Installed ESX on an internal USB pen and have created a single 5.5TB ish datastore

I used the HP ISO for the ESX install (in the hope it would contain all drivers and not cause me any issues), all seems to be working ok and I can see the P410 all ok

I've then created a new VM and done a fresh install of home server 2011, I've given it 2 vcpu's and 8GB, I've given it a 200GB drive for the OS (Which WHS annoyingly splits into 2 when it installs) and a 2TB drive for data.

All is working ok and im just having a play with WHS to get my head round it before I start copying too much data to it (and working out how to structure the shares and permissions etc etc).

But the VM does feel a bit sluggish, slower than I was expecting

Copying files is about what I was expecting (from PC to server - 3GB file), hovers around the 100mb mark for the whole transfer.

and copying the file back (Server to PC, same 3GB file). again hovers around the 100mb mark for the whole transfer.

But the disk latency looks stupidly high doesn't it?

Any suggestions where I should be looking next?

 

[Peter929]

VMware tools are running if that's what you mean?

Yeah both the virtual drives are in the same datastore, is / could that be a bad thing? I wanted it like this ideally just to keep things simple.

Both machines have a single 1gb link at the moment, I could add a 2nd link from the server to switch (if my switch supports it), but would be a pain to add another link from my pc