I brought a HP Smart Array P410 controller and it is installed and working fine in a HP Prolient Microserver with 4 drives in two RAID 1 arrays.

I didn’t realise however that it came without any cache so would only work by directly writing straight to the disk, and the performance was horrible.

So I then brought the 512MB Flash Backed Write Cache (FBWC) memory module as I was under the impression that with FBWC I would not need a battery. I got this idea from a forum post.

"What do you guys think of the choice between 'BBWC' (battery backed write cache) and 'FBWC' (flash backed write cache)? The flashed based ones use non-volitile memory so need no battery."

After installing the cache module however the server pretty much won’t boot. The P410 has a flashing amber light on it, and from the manual that doesn’t sound good. I’ve managed to get to the on board BIOS once and even managed to get to boot to the HP Array Configuration Utility (ACU) CD once, but every other time the Server continuingly reboots once it get to the POST screen and reads ARRAY INITILIZING %%%.

The one time I reached the ACU, it reported a problem with the Cache Module.

To me, it seems like the cache module is faulty, however the supplier tells me

“Do you have an FBWC battery pack, p/n 587324-001, because that is required for the cache to work. If you have it, please complete an RMA form and we'll send a replacement / credit.”

Does this sound right to you? I’ve been ordering the parts from the US and I don’t want to spend $77 + $40 p&p on a battery, wait a week for the shipping to find the card is faulty, and I don’t want to send back a working card?