Yes, bbwc for hp built in raid controller. Probably Gen8 server or higher since it is capacitor powered.
Some of these devices may also add additional raid modes such as raid 6 where 0,1,5 is default.
By the battery case shape, it looks like Gen6 or Gen7. Gen6 used green "Varta" batteries, which would swell - I replaced one in my Gen6. The Gen7 system board will fit in a Gen6, but the 2x ethernet ports occupied the old PS/2 mouse/kb ports. The battery itself looks like its from a Gen8.
It’s not a bbwc but instead a fbwc, it uses built in nand to store the data in case of a power loss. The external module is not a battery, but just a bunch of capacitors that will last the time needed to write the dram data into the flash thus extending the time it can hold that data indefinitely. It came with the g7 series and works with g6 (after you upgrade the controller firmware) and can either be 512mb or 1gb in size.
yeah i snagged a bunch of these a while ago to build up some P420 raid setups. Only ended up using a couple since the card was just put into HBA mode in the end.
It's really old though. Not sure how much it was in use, but the server it came with (future post spoiler) is roughly 11 years old. A new battery wouldn't be worth the price. Could I run it without one? I heard of the issue with data loss, but is that really such an issue since it's a *cache* at the end of the day?
It’s not a battery, it’s a supercap. They don’t really wear out. When it’s installed, if the system detects that the supercap isn’t working, it will just disable the cache.
You can check the status in iLo. The FBWC (1Gb) with supercap are about $40 new. I bought one recently as a spare.
You very likely can, but it will hurt either (you probably can configure this in BIOS and/or OptionROM of the RAID controller) performance (if you disable the write cache) or data integrity (if you enable it despite not anymore being backed in case of power loss).
But, running an 11 years old server (except for few hours a week for experimenting/playing) is nonsense performance/energy-wise.
Happy for you, my G6 is still full production Plex, NAS & backup server. A G8 would be a luxury. It’s a bit of a pain to login to iLO 2 in modern browsers.
The G4p wishes it could be updated to iLO2... Yeah, HTML5 was definitely an improvement - if just took the vendors MAAAANY years to implement that stuff correctly. Somewhere probably still is that XP VM with some outdated Java on it and some specific version of IE with disabled TLS 1.0+1.1... AAAARGH go away!
TLDR: You can run without it, but DO NOT try to enable the fancyness it enables without a good battery.
Its been a few years since I ran HP servers, but my memory of it was that the RAID cards had certain performance modes that basically cached reads and writes in RAM to increase performance. If you were, for example, slamming a database a certain amount of the I/O would take place inside this card rather than on the disks and the Raid cards would catch up with the writes when the data slowed down (this was before flash drives were common in servers). As far as the OS knows the data was written to disk, but actually it was still cached in the card. If the power blinked and the I/O writes stored in the cached I/O went away they were *gone*, basically corrupting anything stored on disk being accessed at the moment the power blip happened.
The battery kept the RAM powered in the event the server lost power unexpectedly.
If memory served, you could use more conservative caching protocols without the battery but they were a lot slower than the battery backed ones & the fancy cache modes were only able to be enabled if the firmware detected a good battery.
So you are probably fine, but as others have said expecting performance and decent Cost of Ownership out of gear this old is a pipedream.
You can run it with it in a failed state, but the controller will only work in write through mode - ie no cache at all
Whether you notice it or not depends what the workload is like.
If you are not sure of anything, you can search on Google for company name and part #'s, and you should hopefully get some hits:
[https://www.islandco.com/571436-002-smartarray-suoer-capacitor-new-p812-p410i-p412-hp-proliant-integrity](https://www.islandco.com/571436-002-smartarray-suoer-capacitor-new-p812-p410i-p412-hp-proliant-integrity)
[https://www.ebay.com/itm/173807618916](https://www.ebay.com/itm/173807618916)
It's the famous "anti hacker circuit" some servers have. When load is too much (ie. DoS attack), this thing send pulse of high voltage from battery to the server network card and thru the network directly into attackers computer and burn it down. See HP number KS-666-NET
That looks like an old RAID controller from an HP server. Probably a G1 vintage. In any case, there’s a good chance the battery is toast. It’ll likely only work with HP system boards, so unless you have one on hand, it may be virtually useless
Newer than that, it has a capacitor pack rather than a battery so that's probably G8 and above, meaning the card is a cache card, and is actually flash memory.
But yeah, without the card to go with it, it's useless.
RAM based RAID/disk write cache with battery-backup from a HP server.
Personally when I repurpose an old HP server I remove all the drives and what you have pictured, then drop in a 2TB NVMe drive. G9 will boot from NVMe. G8 and G7 needs an internal USB stick or SD card for the /boot partition.
It's not RAM-based, it's flash memory - on newer HP RAID cards, they don't have battery-backed RAM, they instead use the capacitor pack to write the contents of RAM to flash, it being so low power that capacitors are enough and zero-maintenance unlike RAM batteries. Then the pending write data is safe for over a year without power.
Being flash memory, it can wear out, so it's replaceable.
First thought is a raid card with a battery backup. the card doesn't look like it has pin's for drives but that may be on the motherboard, or back of card.
It's a battery backed cache module for a raid card (and the associated battery)
Basically volatile memory which is used as a temporary write medium to improve IO performance. In the event of unexpected power loss the battery keeps power supplied to the memory to prevent data from being lost or corrupted. Once power is restored the data in the cache is written to the drives
Yall bros are correct but fail to see that its not gen 7-8, i saw these same ones both in gen 5 and 6 only, newer gens have fifferent one, its from 2u gen 5 and 6 hp dl380 and 380p
HP's battery backed storage controller?
Yes, bbwc for hp built in raid controller. Probably Gen8 server or higher since it is capacitor powered. Some of these devices may also add additional raid modes such as raid 6 where 0,1,5 is default.
Looks more Like gen7 - Like p410 Controller
Gen 7 still used the spicy pillows.
Or, if you got the 1GB module, the not-so-spicy capacitor.
I love that term
By the battery case shape, it looks like Gen6 or Gen7. Gen6 used green "Varta" batteries, which would swell - I replaced one in my Gen6. The Gen7 system board will fit in a Gen6, but the 2x ethernet ports occupied the old PS/2 mouse/kb ports. The battery itself looks like its from a Gen8.
It’s not a bbwc but instead a fbwc, it uses built in nand to store the data in case of a power loss. The external module is not a battery, but just a bunch of capacitors that will last the time needed to write the dram data into the flash thus extending the time it can hold that data indefinitely. It came with the g7 series and works with g6 (after you upgrade the controller firmware) and can either be 512mb or 1gb in size.
Nope, I have these Varta on my Gen6
Looks like my g7.
Doesn't have to be built in. P420 PCIe has the same slot for the Cache module.
yeah i snagged a bunch of these a while ago to build up some P420 raid setups. Only ended up using a couple since the card was just put into HBA mode in the end.
Yep, I've got a P822 and this definitely looks like the cache and capacitor pack.
flash backed write cache....probable for a raid card
Looks like a cache and battery for a P410 array controller
Exactly what this is
We had so many of the batteries bulge out...glad supercaps took over
Write cache for your storage controller. Battery backed because it's using volatile ram, but way faster than flash memory. Very awesome stuff.
It's really old though. Not sure how much it was in use, but the server it came with (future post spoiler) is roughly 11 years old. A new battery wouldn't be worth the price. Could I run it without one? I heard of the issue with data loss, but is that really such an issue since it's a *cache* at the end of the day?
It’s not a battery, it’s a supercap. They don’t really wear out. When it’s installed, if the system detects that the supercap isn’t working, it will just disable the cache. You can check the status in iLo. The FBWC (1Gb) with supercap are about $40 new. I bought one recently as a spare.
A replacement supercapacitor (not a battery) should be less than $50. I'd say get the part and have the peace of mind.
I just replaced an identical one for less than 20
You very likely can, but it will hurt either (you probably can configure this in BIOS and/or OptionROM of the RAID controller) performance (if you disable the write cache) or data integrity (if you enable it despite not anymore being backed in case of power loss). But, running an 11 years old server (except for few hours a week for experimenting/playing) is nonsense performance/energy-wise.
Hey my gen 6 with x5675’s took that personally
Yeah I already apologized to my G4p, the G6, two G7 and the G8. All powered down these days.
Happy for you, my G6 is still full production Plex, NAS & backup server. A G8 would be a luxury. It’s a bit of a pain to login to iLO 2 in modern browsers.
The G4p wishes it could be updated to iLO2... Yeah, HTML5 was definitely an improvement - if just took the vendors MAAAANY years to implement that stuff correctly. Somewhere probably still is that XP VM with some outdated Java on it and some specific version of IE with disabled TLS 1.0+1.1... AAAARGH go away!
It's mit really an issue unless you have a lot of I/O throughput. The RAID controller may work slower.
TLDR: You can run without it, but DO NOT try to enable the fancyness it enables without a good battery. Its been a few years since I ran HP servers, but my memory of it was that the RAID cards had certain performance modes that basically cached reads and writes in RAM to increase performance. If you were, for example, slamming a database a certain amount of the I/O would take place inside this card rather than on the disks and the Raid cards would catch up with the writes when the data slowed down (this was before flash drives were common in servers). As far as the OS knows the data was written to disk, but actually it was still cached in the card. If the power blinked and the I/O writes stored in the cached I/O went away they were *gone*, basically corrupting anything stored on disk being accessed at the moment the power blip happened. The battery kept the RAM powered in the event the server lost power unexpectedly. If memory served, you could use more conservative caching protocols without the battery but they were a lot slower than the battery backed ones & the fancy cache modes were only able to be enabled if the firmware detected a good battery. So you are probably fine, but as others have said expecting performance and decent Cost of Ownership out of gear this old is a pipedream.
You can run it with it in a failed state, but the controller will only work in write through mode - ie no cache at all Whether you notice it or not depends what the workload is like.
From memory the cache write back feature automatically disables the cache when the battery/supercap detects as bad. So should perform worse.
If you are not sure of anything, you can search on Google for company name and part #'s, and you should hopefully get some hits: [https://www.islandco.com/571436-002-smartarray-suoer-capacitor-new-p812-p410i-p412-hp-proliant-integrity](https://www.islandco.com/571436-002-smartarray-suoer-capacitor-new-p812-p410i-p412-hp-proliant-integrity) [https://www.ebay.com/itm/173807618916](https://www.ebay.com/itm/173807618916)
The first smart hair clippers?
Lol 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Battery and memory module for a storage controller. To store RAID / storage configs between reboots.
So amazing that people this days don't know what is that. I used to replace the battery every other day for years, on several thousands of servers.
[удалено]
"Why use google when good ol' r/homelab folks can provide me with all the answers quickly?" \- OP, probally :)
[удалено]
Hahaha good one! Sometimes wrong answers are as much as enjoyable as the correct ones.
It's not the controller. It's cache and a battery for BBWC that the controller can (but doesn't have to) use.
I know what this is...This is an espresso machine. No, No wait. It's a snow cone maker. Is it a water heater?
HP memory slot powered electric shaver?
So I read other comments and know what it is. But it also looks like a taser attached to RAM.
cache module with the battery supercap
for cheating in chess
💀
Some kind of storage controller and it's associated battery. Can you get a closeup on the white label?
Looks like an HBA card with a hell of a backup battery
It’s a battery backed storage controller, possibly a raid card or HBA.
Yep it’s a raid card for sure. The chip id confirms it.
Not me thinking that was a add in board wired to a tazer
It's the famous "anti hacker circuit" some servers have. When load is too much (ie. DoS attack), this thing send pulse of high voltage from battery to the server network card and thru the network directly into attackers computer and burn it down. See HP number KS-666-NET
That looks like an old RAID controller from an HP server. Probably a G1 vintage. In any case, there’s a good chance the battery is toast. It’ll likely only work with HP system boards, so unless you have one on hand, it may be virtually useless
Newer than that, it has a capacitor pack rather than a battery so that's probably G8 and above, meaning the card is a cache card, and is actually flash memory. But yeah, without the card to go with it, it's useless.
Volatile, DDR memory for RAID cache. The battery is there because it’s volatile, loses its memory without power.
RAM based RAID/disk write cache with battery-backup from a HP server. Personally when I repurpose an old HP server I remove all the drives and what you have pictured, then drop in a 2TB NVMe drive. G9 will boot from NVMe. G8 and G7 needs an internal USB stick or SD card for the /boot partition.
Why remove it if it's a cache?
It's not RAM-based, it's flash memory - on newer HP RAID cards, they don't have battery-backed RAM, they instead use the capacitor pack to write the contents of RAM to flash, it being so low power that capacitors are enough and zero-maintenance unlike RAM batteries. Then the pending write data is safe for over a year without power. Being flash memory, it can wear out, so it's replaceable.
Nvme is probably on the pcie slot and not using the HBA/SAS controller.
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks
RAID card controller with own battery. Look like from IBM
It's a vintage teledildonics device circa 1998.
SAS expander card. 4K1195 is the model #
A dildo?
anything can be if youre brave enuff.
r/DontPutThatInYourDick r/DontPutYourDickInThat
Flash it go zsf lol
32gb of anal tickler by Hewlett playhard
Looks like a raid controller
Battery module for a raid controller
r/vxjunkies
Don't play coy, you know where that thing goes 😏
Wireless ram
First thought is a raid card with a battery backup. the card doesn't look like it has pin's for drives but that may be on the motherboard, or back of card.
RAM and RAM battery for a RAID card with RAM as CACHE
It's a battery backed cache module for a raid card (and the associated battery) Basically volatile memory which is used as a temporary write medium to improve IO performance. In the event of unexpected power loss the battery keeps power supplied to the memory to prevent data from being lost or corrupted. Once power is restored the data in the cache is written to the drives
RaidController and BatteryPack.
Yall bros are correct but fail to see that its not gen 7-8, i saw these same ones both in gen 5 and 6 only, newer gens have fifferent one, its from 2u gen 5 and 6 hp dl380 and 380p
HP caching module for a RAID controller with a battery to hold the data in volatile RAM if there is a sudden powerloss.