Price:
As tested AU$15,460
Test configuration:
7 x HP "branded" Model BD14685A26 Ultra320 SCSI drives (1.027TB raw) in a RAID-ADG configuration.
Drive specs:
- Capacity: 146GB
- Rotational speed: 10000 RPM
- Average seek: 4.9ms
- Buffer: 8MB
- MTBF: 1,400,000 hours
In terms of case volume, the HP is the smallest of all the units tested. Even though the case is 4RU the HP is very shallow in depth in comparison to the other units. Or at least it would be very shallow if it were not for the enormous pair of cooling fans on the dual power supplies that resemble rocket booster nozzles out of some cheesy sci-fi flick. The turbine fans are very large and any one of the fans is more than capable of providing adequate airflow through the power supply, controllers, and drive array. The test unit had good redundancy with two power supplies and two controller modules.
The array drives are Ultra320 SCSI units and while they are more expensive than the ATA alternatives they have a lower latency because of their higher rotational speed, and a higher MTBF in high I/O environments. The HP drive cradles are very substantial and constructed from cast aluminium with very smooth insertion and removal.
Management of the HP is the purview of the Array Configuration Utility (ACU) which has a relatively small subset of configuration and management tasks but was certainly more than adequate for basic maintenance, and there were some nice touches like the ability to finely tune the read/write cache ratio.
We should note, however, that some of the versions of this tool on HP's Web site will not work with the 500 G2. We initially downloaded V6.40 and were unable to "discover" the 500 G2 with the ACU. HP suggested we update to the latest version 7.16.2.0, which worked without a hitch.
Quite frankly, we expected the HP's cost per GB to be a little higher but it was a reasonable AU$15.05. We also expected performance to be lower than the other units as the HP's array was configured as RAID-ADG, which is in general not as fast as RAID-5. The HP's performance was below the Adaptec and Nexsan in the large file write test but the HP was only marginally slower than the fastest, the SANbloc, in the small file write test. In all the file read tests the HP was the fastest of all the units tested.
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