A7143A HP PCI 4-Channel RAID160 SA SCSI Controller

A7143A is the HP RAID160 SA controller: four Wide Ultra160 SCSI channels and 256 MB of battery-backed cache on a 64-bit, 66 MHz PCI board. The channels support up to 56 disk drives, 14 per channel, and the controller is backward compatible with Wide Ultra2 devices. Four external VHDCI connectors are used; the two internal 68-pin connectors are not supported on A7143A, and each of ports 1 and 2 can use only one connector at a time. Ports 3 and 4 take external drives only.

RAID 0 striping and the fault-tolerant levels RAID 1, 1+0, 5 and ADG are supported, with hot-pluggable drives, drive movement, adjustable stripe size, S.M.A.R.T. drives, several online spares per array, background initialization, vPars and Ignite-UX. It runs HP-UX 11i v1, 64-bit only. The spare boards are A7143-67001 and A7143-69001.

The array accelerator is a removable battery-backed 100 MHz SDRAM DIMM with ECC. It offers 256 MB, of which 224 MB is usable cache and 32 MB the transfer buffer. Two NiMH battery packs preserve cached data for up to 72 hours, and new batteries may be low on first install: the charge completes in under four hours, after which the cache enables itself. The PCI interface runs at 66 MHz with up to 528 MB/s and works as a bus master; mixing 66 MHz and 33 MHz devices on one bus drops the bandwidth to 33 MHz speed.

Fault management includes auto-reliability monitoring, dynamic sector repair and S.M.A.R.T. alerts. In the HP 9000 rp4440 and rp8420 the card installs only in slot 8, which limits it to one per system. See the HP 9000 rp4440 and rp8420 for the servers that take A7143A.