Hi,
Sorry for the delay in response,as i was out of office.
I reached out to my MSA experts and got more clarification on your query.
Smart Array controllers operate in one of two modes: 1) Smart Array mode, which means it uses its onboard intelligence to aggregate local/directly connected drives into logical disk groups,
or 2) HBA mode, which means the intelligence is within an external system and it acts as an initiator only (though it can still do simple RAID with JBODs). The onboard cache is only used if it own the completion of a write to disk, which it does not if connected to shared storage like the MSA.
So no, the SmartCache is not used, nor is it configurable.
This is more of Smart Array functionality and Smart Array needs to be working in HBA mode in this scenario.Also all this information is documented in Smart array controller guides https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c04441382.
Your feedback on included the details on MSA docs is considered and we will work on it.
Apologies for the confusion.
Thanks for being valuable HPE customer