Right now it’s sitting on top of the motherboard. The P410 has an external battery pack finding a place to tuck it in a 1U rack server that wasn’t designed for it was interesting. Dead, dead, dead.Īnother friend/hardware sugar daddy found an HP P410 SmartArray controller and sent it my way as well. I popped the top lid off the server and removed the card the Lithium-Ion battery was bloated. With the Adaptec’s battery out of commission, the write cache was disabled. Most controllers have a battery or capacitor to power the cache through medium-duration power outages (a day or two). A power outage at an inopportune time can wipe the temporary cache and nuke whatever write operations were pending. When the OS requests a write, the controller immediately returns success, freeing up the OS to do other things, while in fact the controller is storing the write request in a DRAM cache until the disks can get around to it. The RAID controller has a battery-backed cache, which speeds up write operations considerably. While setting it up, the Adaptec RAID controller whined that its battery was missing or damaged. (For example, 14 of the fans can be swapped out while the server is running, and it seems that the server has enough cooling capacity to keep running even if a few of the fans are offline.) It’s easy to work on and it’s built for high availability.
It draws a lot of power (500W under full load). There’s not much to say about the server itself. 16 40mm dual-rotor cooling fans, because if you’re going to sound like a jet engine, you might as well go all out.8 146GB 10K RPM SAS drives attached to an Adaptec STK RAID controller card.8GB DDR2 ECC RAM (soon to be upgraded to 20GB).