Cannot replace broken hard drive with LSI HBA

[Karli Sjöberg]

Hey all!

I´m just giving a shout out here to see if anyone else have had similar
experiences working with LSI/Avago HBA's in FreeBSD.

For some time now, about a year or so, we´ve had several times were hard
drives have dropped out, you pull it out, pop a new back in, but it
never shows up in the OS. When inserted, nothing prints in the logs, and
physically, it just blinks for a half a second, then nothing. The entire
server then needs to be rebooted to get the drive back.

As for the hardware, we have several SuperMicro servers, an HP, and an
old SUN server that all have this problem. It´s happened with both old
and new drives from different manufacturers and sizes. The only thing in
common has been the LSI/Avago HBA.

The software is FreeBSD-10.1-STABLE as per this[*] bug, very close to
10.2-RELEASE, mps driver version 20 and the firmware has been flashed to
19. Also tried firmware version 20 but ZFS went nuts, displaying
checksum errors on just about every disk in the pool.

I´ts gotten to the point I´m fed up and have to ask if someone else
could think of a fix, since neither software nor firmware upgrade seems
to make a difference. Or to suggest another HBA instead?

Thanks in advance!

/K

[*]: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=191348