Use P410i from HP Proliant ML350 G6 as HBA

General Discussion
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Hello, I have a HP Proliant ML350 G6 and my drive connected via the drive bay at the bottom of the case (connected to the P410i controller) aren’t showing up in truenas. I know, it’s because it’s a raid card and not an HBA, so how can I use this card as an HBA, I want truenas to do the raid configuration. Also, I don’t know if I could talk about that here, but anyways, I have 3*2TO drives plus a 1TO one, can I do a RAID1 with these drives ? I think using different capacity drives is possible only with unraid, but it’s paid software and I can’t buy it for now (also, I have 2 years of “experience” with truenas, the setup is easy and so far I didn’t have any problem).

Thanks in advance !

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If I had to guess you’d want to flash the P410i into IT mode.

Some quick google-fu has HP saying it isn’t possible, but in the same post a user quotes an article saying that you can indeed.

Good luck, hopefully it works. Pretty certain you wouldn’t be able to run most of the commands in the article from TrueNas cli unless you’re in dev mode - might be worth booting into another OS to do the needful.

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He is on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS so I don’t know if I can do it, the firmware upgrade should be fine however. I will test that and gives you an update…

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The firmware update went nice, but nothing change. I finally do a raid 0 of each drives in my P410i array manager, so now it’s showing up in truenas, but I can’t do it to my 1TB one, so I guess I will leave this like that. To flash the firmware I used unetbootin and I download the firmware updater (the last compatible for Proliant ML350 Gen 6) here : “HP SPP 2017.04.0 ISO : HP : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive” (if you’re interessed). I will mark this as resolved…

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Having owned an ML350 G6 before, and dealt with the P410 series SmartArray cards, I’ll suggest that they’re only suitable for boot device mirroring. It can’t be coaxed into behaving like a proper HBA, so the best course of action is to add one.

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I have an HP DL380 G6 with the same onboard P410i. The HBA can be flashed to HBA mode but requires a kernel patch to operate afterwards, which makes it complicated to use in an appliance type setup like TrueNAS. I wound up disabling mine and putting a cheap Dell Perc controller in instead.