Hi everyone,
I’ve been expanding a small lab setup built around an HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 and ran into a storage problem that has me questioning whether I’m dealing with firmware, cabling, or a controller compatibility issue.
The server is using a Smart Array P408i-a for the internal drives, while I added a P408e-p in one of the PCIe slots for external SAS storage. The external enclosure contains a mixture of 12G SAS HDDs and a couple of enterprise SSDs.
Everything initially looked normal. iLO reports the PCIe card correctly, the controller appears during POST, and the external drives all spin up. The enclosure also shows healthy status LEDs.
The problem is that SSA does not consistently detect the external drives.
Sometimes the enclosure appears after a cold boot, but after restarting the server it disappears completely. Reseating the SAS cable occasionally brings it back, which originally made me think the cable was bad.
I replaced the cable and moved the controller to another PCIe slot, but the behaviour stayed the same.
What made things more confusing is that this started after I updated the server firmware and Smart Array firmware. I have checked the obvious things such as controller mode, drive firmware, PCIe slot settings, and power to the enclosure.
While comparing the DL380 Gen10 controller and expansion options, I came across this https://ormsystems.com/servers/hpe-servers/hpe-proliant-dl380-gen10-servers-price.html, which confirmed that the platform supports both internal and external Smart Array configurations.
At this point I’m wondering whether I have a firmware mismatch between the P408e-p and the external enclosure, or whether the enclosure expects a different type of SAS HBA/controller.
One other thing I noticed is that the P408e-p gets fairly warm even at idle. The DL380 airflow should normally handle passive cards, but I’m also wondering whether temperature could cause the controller to behave strangely once the server has been running for a while.
Has anyone run into similar intermittent SAS visibility issues with a DL380 Gen10 and an external disk shelf?
Would you troubleshoot the firmware first, or would you start by testing the enclosure with a plain HBA to rule out Smart Array compatibility?
