LSI SAS 2008 (mfi) on SuperMicro X8SI6-F

[Rumen Telbizov]

Hello Damien, list:

I've been following this discussion with great interest and I hope the
result of it
will be the merge of a stable driver in STABLE branch soon.

I brought this not a long ago (
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2011-January/061237.html)
and I was hoping to have this driver in 8.x before 8.3 release.


> What is sad is that these controllers are becoming very mainstream now,
> we're getting them more and more on Dell servers , and the fbsd project
> still struggles with them (for reasons I don't know, might be LSI's
> fault, might be a lack of resources or interest...)
>

I couldn't agree more. I've been testing those (9211-8i) myself here on a
bunch of SuperMicro
servers and I'd say that I am very pleased with the performance of those
HBAs (not the mention the
price ~$230-250 CAD). On a 12 x SAS disks with a direct attached backplane
826A (6Gbit SAS2.0)
in RAID0 across all of them (md linux software raid) I was able to squeeze *
2.1GBytes/s* sequential write
(dd kind of style write). With the same setup and SATA disks I get to
1.2GByte/s. I did use 2 controllers
to accomodate ports for all the disks. I get the same speed with ZFS and
9.0-CURRENT.

On a related note I must say that I do have serious problems with the
bandwidth when I use
the SAS expander version of this backplane (826E26) (I cannot get more than
200-250 MBytes/s).
I've been investigating this problem with LSI's help and still no
conclusion. It looks like I am using
only one channel.

Anyway this was just my humble attempt to encourage the MFC of this driver.
I think the card is
pretty good. I'd like to hear other people's opinion on this HBA though.

Regards,

-- 
Rumen Telbizov
http://telbizov.com