I got a HP ProLiant DL360 G7 server that I were hoping to use for virtualization. It came with four 146GB SAS drives, that isn’t much storage space at all these days. I bought four Seagate Firecuda (ST1000LX015) 1TB drives to replace these with. I would prefer something else, but this was the only 2,5" drive the local vendor had that wasn’t expensive SSD.
Prior to replacing drives, I had tested installation of Proxmox and were pleased with how quiet this server was. After the drive replacements, it is running at full speed on the cooling fans. Now it is loud enough to be clearly audible through 18cm (7 inch) concrete walls.
The cause is that now the server thinks the drives are overheating for some reason. The P410i Smart Array Controller is reporting overheating condition on all of them. I guess HP drives have some magic baked into them that normal drives does not have.
My question is… would replacing this controller with a different one resolve this issue, or am I stuck with the low capacity SAS drives it came with? Or would a PCIe card also cause the same “overheating” issue?
This is my first piece of enterprise type gear that I actually try to use, so I am a bit lost now. Certainly not usable at home with this noise level.
I checked the cooling profile in the BIOS, and it is set to “optimal cooling” or whatever it is called. The other option is “increased cooling”, which is more intensive. I did not find any option to customize it or disable the overheating condition.
The fans run silent with the original SAS drives, so the cooling profile is not the issue.
I did pull out one of the new drives that were “overheating”, and it was cold to the touch. So either generic drives does not have temerature reporting, or HP has a different way it is reported to the system.
Since it is the built in RAID controller that is receiving the information and reporting overheating to the system, my thought was that maybe a PCIe controller card would resolve this? However, my fear is that 3rd party PCIe cards will cause the same problems as the drives do.
I have already spent quite a bit of money on this server and the new drives. This makes me a bit hesitant to go spend even more money expansion cards that might not work. Hopefully someone already has some experience with this.
I only searched the web a bit, and it looks like one of the reasons for HPE servers being reduced price used, is they Seem to want HP firmwared drives.
I don’t have a HP server myself, but it seems to crop up, and I haven’t seen an actual solution, just workarounds, with known “good” drives that don’t cause the ramp up.
The sites reporting it seem to indicate it’s an sensor called something like temp sensor 29, which seems to give a bogus reading with most drives, except a few?
When I poked around the web myself, I also read about that sendor. Since it happens when swapping the drives, I concluded it was the drives themselves and not an actual temperature sensor in the area of the drives.
I didn’t come across any known “good” drive list. I’ll try to find that!
My hope was that using a third party drive controller could solve the issue, since it is the built in controller that is reporting the overheating to the system. I didn’t come across anything specific regarding that.
And the “sensor” might be a smart readout reported by HP’s firmware.
I actually have a couple of HP drives, I’ll have a look at smartctl see if it shows anything odd, but doubt the raw value would correspond to anything meaningful
Doing some further reading, it seems PCIe cards can cause the full fan speed as well. Came across it in a forum post where a user is asked to “ensure there is no 3rd party PCIe card or hard drives installed in the server.”
I didn’t even think of looking up something as a drive compatibility list. Swapping drives is a trivial task, I thought. Looks like there’s no way around than getting either HP drives, or a known compatible third party one.
Perhaps I should cut my losses on this server before it spirals out of control.
Unfortunately one of the main reasons I wanted to replace the drives was exactly because I need the extra storage for how I wanted to use it. The plan was to virtualize several machines, and most of them doesn’t require much storage, but I don’t want to settle in on something I need to reinstall eventually.
As a sidenote, I even bought a 10 gigabit network card for it (I am setting up a 10 gig network), but the card just doesn’t work in the server. Eventhough it isn’t state of the art PCIe, it is still new enough version to be compatible with the card. Yes, I did try running the server without the card. Fans still go crazy with the drives I bought. However, this is a separate topic I suppose.
With the amount of money spent on the server, I could’ve bought a brand new mid-range PC. I need to just put it aside for now and rethink the whole thing. Usually a solution presents itself after a pause.
Oh, and to ansver your question, jotm. I have not been able to locate any overrides or custom profile options for the fans. The only available options are two cooling profiles named “optimal” and “increased”. I have tried setting the power management profile to energy saving as well, without success.
With regards to drive speeds I do not know if they are limited or not. I don’t think this would affect the fan speed?
I went through the compatible drive list and found WD20SPZX available locally, which I bought one of and put into the server. Fans did not go into jet plane mode. Bought three more, and fans still run at acceptable levels. Looks like this drive model worked for me.