ZFS Advice

[Adam McDougall]

Wes Morgan wrote:
> On Wed, 6 Aug 2008, Adam McDougall wrote:
>
>> Wes Morgan wrote:
>>>
>>> http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/standard_product_ics/sas_ics/lsisas1068e/index.html 
>>>
>>> Not much onboard ram, but it's PCI-E and even SAS. CDW lists it for 
>>> $155. That would be cheaper than buying a new board with a PCI-X 
>>> slot or two, and would even handle SAS drives. Claims to be based on 
>>> the "LSISAS 1068E SAS controller". Any idea if that is supported? I 
>>> don't see it listed in the mfi man page. LSI has a Linux driver for 
>>> download. That card looks like it would be just what I need.
>>> _______________________________________________
>>>
>> mpt2 at pci0:8:0:0:        class=0x010000 card=0x31501000 
>> chip=0x00581000 rev=0x04 hdr=0x00
>>   vendor     = 'LSI Logic (Was: Symbios Logic, NCR)'
>>   device     = 'SAS 3000 series, 8-port with 1068E -StorPort'
>>   class      = mass storage
>>   subclass   = SCSI
>> mpt2: <LSILogic SAS/SATA Adapter> port 0xa800-0xa8ff mem 
>> 0xfcbfc000-0xfcbfffff,0xfcbe0000-0xfcbeffff irq 17 at device 0.0 on pci8
>>
>> da1 at mpt2 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
>> da1: <SEAGATE ST914602SSUN146G 0603> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
>> da1: 300.000MB/s transfers
>> da1: Command Queueing Enabled
>> da1: 140009MB (286739329 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 17848C)
>>
>
> Excellent! How is your experience with the performance and reliability 
> of the card?
>
The system is in production right now with a smallish amount of load, so 
the quick test I did to see 85MB/sec write to a raidz1 and 60M/sec read 
is probably a bit unfair.  Each set of 4 disks is attached to a SAS 
expander which is attached to the card internally in a sun x4150.  I 
didn't try to tune it for performance before I started using that volume 
for storage in a manner where size and realiability were more important 
than speed.  But on a whole it seems reliable.  I won't have any time 
soon to get it into a better state for testing, but I may test the new 
ZFS patches on it before that.  I've been pretty happy with all other 
MPT family chips so I would doubt it has any crippling speed problems.