Controller for ZFS

[Tom Evans]

On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 10:49 AM, Borja Marcos <borjam at sarenet.es> wrote:
> The one I use is sold by Dell as the "H200". They usually try to disuade you by saying that it's not intelligent, doesn't
> offer RAID, some of their "configuration aids" even forbid it... I just tell the salesman to shut up because I know much better than him.

The one I use was labelled as "Dell 6GB SAS HBA" (I got it from ebay,
~$100) with 2 external mini-SAS connectors. This could then be flashed
with LSI's own firmware to 9211-8i-IT firmware (it doesn't seem to
care how the ports are configured). These are then hooked up to a
couple of 16 bay enclosures with SAS expanders.

This then gives you the perfect ZFS HBA, no more configuration
required. Each drive attached appears as /dev/daN.

(One warning, if your system is EFI, then LSI's DOS, linux and FreeBSD
based flash utils will not work, you'll get a message about "Failed to
initialise PAL". Put the card in a BIOS based system, or (much harder)
boot an EFI shell and use LSI's EFI utils instead)

>
> The only problem: beware if you are using a built-in backplane in the server, some manufacturers insist on using different
> cabling schemes for different controllers and you could run into stupid problems because of that.
>
> FreeBSD 10 identifies one of my cards as this one:
> mps0: <LSI SAS2008> port 0x7c00-0x7cff mem 0xd4ff0000-0xd4ffffff,0xd4f80000-0xd4fbffff irq 80 at device 0.0 on pci67
> mps0: Firmware: 07.15.08.00, Driver: 16.00.00.00-fbsd

This is quite old firmware, do you not have problems with this
(particularly large drives or SSDs)? I believe I am using 15, and the
latest is 16.

Cheers

Tom