redux: 48 or 96 sata3 paths ... specific ZFS hardware proposal

[Rich]

A couple of notes.

- The 9211-8i has IR and IT firmware revisions; you probably want the
latter. Flashing from one to the other, last I saw, requires booting a
DOS environment and destructively reflashing.
- I am reasonably certain, but cannot swear to it (I don't have the
rev of the X8DTH motherboard with the LSI SAS2008 chip onboard) that
the motherboard has the IR firmware out of the box.
- If memory serves, the way the PCIe bandwidth works on that board is
that slots 1-3 go to CPU1's interface and slots 4-7 go to CPU2.

- Rich

On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 5:13 PM, Jason Usher <jusher71 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Daniel,
>
> --- On Thu, 9/22/11, Daniel Kalchev <daniel at digsys.bg> wrote:
>
>> > But the X8DTH-6F motherboard seems too good to be true
>> ... it has 7 8x pcie slots, and further, has two sff8087
>> connectors onboard with the EXACT SAME LSI chipset as the
>> 9211-8i cards above - so you can get an extra 8 drives on
>> this motherboard using the same driver.  Takes
>> xeon5500/5600 (6core, potentially) at 6.4 QPI ... so, very
>> modern there.
>
>
> (snip)
>
>
>> How many LSI cards do you intend to use? You may wish to
>> look at the architecture (CPU/chipset/PCIe interconnects) in
>> order to make more informed decision.
>
>
> I was thinking of using 4 of the cards - that gets me 40 total SATA3 ports (32 on the 4 cards, plus 8 more on the board).
>
> (I am assuming that any 6Gb SAS port is also a perfectly functioning SATA3 port, also at 6Gb)
>
> The chipset is "LSI 2008" and is identical on the cards and on this motherboard, which appeals to me greatly.  PCIe interconnect is "X8 lane, PCI Express 2.0 compliant" and "X8 PCIe 4000 MB/s".  I see no mention of its cpu.
>
> What are you suggesting here with that information ?  What am I looking for, or trying to avoid ?
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