Installing bbwc

Honored Contributor. Drive Write cache refers to the drive internal cache, that should stay disabled when you use the drives on a raid controller. The smart array controllers offer a good disk based fault tolerance.

You should leave disk to be used as hot spare and monitor the controller status for any events. RE your choice for fault tolerance: Every selection has a tradeoff. Raid 5 has poorer write performance, but better read performance. Raid 1 has better write performance, but poorer write performance. The truth is out there, but I forgot the URL.. I'm reviewing my servers right now, installing "hpacucli" tool and retrieving information about their controllers.

I'll come soon to report what I've got and discuss a little more about that matter with you. Thank you for the answers, for now. HPE Pro. Hi Edson, See the attached manual. BBWC enabler can be a problem. Shut down the server and carefully remove the Smart Array controller.

Then, insert the BBWC enabler into the slot so that the white handles clip on the outside of the module, as shown in Figure D. Once the module is installed in the system, you can verify that the system has access to the additional memory. You should see a change in the memory displayed, as shown in Figure E.

After you add the BBWC enabler to the server, the first few boots may display a message that the module is not fully charged. This is normal, and the controller will handle the trickle charge of the enabler. The full memory amount is available to the controller, but the battery-backed part is limited until fully charged. Excessive application logging, bad code, rogue applications, or other poorly implemented solutions can improve only so much by having more horsepower thrown at them.

Of course, there are other solutions, such as server optimizers and drive array configuration selections. Eventually, you will be asked to provide more performance from the server system--and you may not have any more silver bullets left! However, adding the BBWC enabler provides an easy performance boost, and for a value, at that. HP Product Bulletin. Here, you can obtain specific part numbers for ordering BBWC pieces and install the product bulleting application locally on your computer.

This article provides a good, detailed explanation of the actual mechanics of drive performance and the Windows measurable elements. Rick has years of IT experience and focuses on virtualization, Windows-based server administration, and system hardware.

Your disk controllers do not already have a BBWC module, and one can be added. You have unmeasured less performance on one server than another like server with less utilization. You may be adding significantly more functionality to an existing system with no new servers being added. Just wanted to say thanks for this also.

Works great. Great article, thank you! A pack of four of them will be slightly wider and longer than the compartment, so some hacking of the plastic will be needed to make it work.

I will enlist the help of a local Batteries Plus who stocks such cells and has staff that can custom-assemble a pack. I wonder if we could just use the capacitor from the P though instead of going to all this trouble?

The tech specs on the supercaps are 17 Farad at 4. If I had to guess, 17 F charged to 4. The battery packs are meant to last 48 hours… which HP assumes should be enough time to either get your server up and running again so the P can write the memory contents out to disk, or even swap the cache module with battery still attached onto a replacement array controller, in case it was the controller itself that died.

You can have the batteries themselves removed from that little controller board on the battery module… it just treats the missing batteries like it would if they were bad or something. I tried this on a G6.

I shut down the server and made sure to get the polarity right, powered it up and the pcb board just blinks amber-green left it this way for a couple days. I tried another battery from another swapped out the battery so Im using the same pcb board and it worked just fine.

So Im not sure why this didnt work for me. Hmm, Were they NiMh rechargeable batteries? They should only be 1. This is great! Very nice! AAA-s worked fine. Work as well as the day they were installed. Works like a charm. I slightly modified the wiring. Added an 2 pin connector between bbwc battery and rechargables case to be able change the AA to AAA without soldering again.

With no purpose at all. My two cents: I did this mod to my old server, however I used a batterypack with soldered connections. I want it soldered all the way, no battery holder or connectors that can corrode and glitch. You do not want to risk any bad contact to these batteries or it may corrupt your data. And some kind of box to have them in is important so if they leak they wont destroy anything.

Also only do this mod on servers out of warranty or HP will never help you. Someone was commenting on short battery life while in high temperatures inside the server, well if it gets that hot in your server you have other problems to worry about, it should never be a problem. Great post, just replaced the batteries on my server.

A few tips, I found scoring the edges of the cover by running a sharp utility knife along the long edges helps when removing the cover, resulting in less warping of the case. A side note, I noticed the photos in the post show a battery, which appears to be used in the P and P Smart Array as opposed to the P mentioned in the text.

Okay, after some thinking, mAh is unbelievably low for a battery unit with four cells, so I took a look at my old cells and what do you know? The mAh spec is per cell, so the entire battery unit would be mAh. Just curious, what would the life expectancy of the AAA cells be? I would expect them to be the same as the OEM units, apart from the packaging they are just standard NiMH cells, so if the replacement AAA cells are decent quality they should be the same.

Of course not all cells are good quality! Worked sweet. Thank you very much, I had previously bought several spare battery packs and most of which arrived damaged. This is a genius and effective way to stick it to the man! Great solution. I am in Alaska. On top of everything else, you can not buy a replacement locally. One small thing, I used a glue gun to mount the battery holder to the case. Thanks for a great post. I did the same to replace a battery pack on my DL P controller.

I employed a slight variation though, I first removed the old batteries as you did and then I cut off the plastic section that had contained the old batteries. Next I soldered one of these to the small metal plates on the PCB:. It fits so snugly it is almost as if it was made to go there. It charged up within 2 hours and now my cache is back on line and working just fine.

Worked Perfectly. I just soldered the batteries together after taping them together in a cube. Keeping the original leads to the board made it a bit simpler.

The original cells are just standard NiMh cells in a compact casing, normal NiMh AA cells are a fine replacement, you dont need anything more fancy, the performance should be exactly the same, if not better!

The battery preserves the data in the otherwise volatile write buffer and then the controller writes the data to disk upon next power on so there is never any substantial load on the batteries. I suspect any AAA Ni-Mh batteries will work, but probably a good idea to stay in the mah ballpark to avoid stressing the charge circuit. If the current is really negligible then a low self discharge battery may preserve the data for longer, however this would only come in to play after months of no power and is probably irrelevant.

Work perfectly for me. Thanks so much for your guide. I think it at least doubled backup time for RAID memory cache as original is 4. Used hot glue and transparent tape for mount.

The old batteries were bloated pregnant. Hi Axel, If its the original controller and it used to work OK, then yes its damaged or mis-configured. If not it could be the wrong part?

I just wanted to say thank you for this blog post! I recently purchased a P card from eBay and as you can imagine, the batteries very quickly died on me due to old age. Your solution was quick, simple and has the added advantage of allowing the batteries to now be replaced easily in the future. Thanks again! And most of the one i got from ebay or amazone were just old crap somtime older than the one i was trying to replace.

I went a bit further than the OP and completely did away with the plastic carriage that the original unit came in. I soldered the battery clip to the original PCB, and then hot glued it to the battery holder and insulated both the cells and the PCB in two separate sections of heat shrink plastic. The batteries fit into the original location, and the PCB slid down between the disk backplane and the fans.

Did this on 2 HP dl g5 and i works great. Does any one know what could be the problem? Great article! I have the same issue the other users on here ran into with space inside the chassis so I wound up taking out the DVD drive for now to accommodate the battery holder. Just repaired my batterypack, working great.