Recommended HBA for ZFS, contemporary

[Linda Kateley]

On 8/22/16 11:30 AM, Dmitry Morozovsky wrote:
> Karl,
>
> On Mon, 22 Aug 2016, Karl Denninger wrote:
>
>> I'm still a fan of the LSI SAS-9211 cards along with (for higher
>> density) a SAS port expander.  I've been extremely happy with this
>> combination with one caveat -- most systems must boot from the actual
>> card and not a port on the expander(s) you connect to it due to BIOS
>> constraints.  They're also crazily cost-effective on-balance.
>>
>> In practice this means you have 4 ports on the base card available (2
>> used for mirrored boot drives, 2 for other things) and the rest of the
>> disks go on the expander, or you run more than one card.
>>
>> Whether you can actually saturate this combination depends on what you
>> attach.  In large configurations, especially those stuffed with SSDs,
>> you can -- at which point something faster such as the 93xx series which
> which immediately leads me to the question: what is the driver supporting 9300
> in HBA mode?  Quick googling does not reveal interoperability, and 9300 is not
> in hardware list for FreeBSD yet.
The avago website has driver firmware combos for all of the different 
cards. The only ones that are troublesome are the onboard supermicro. I 
was told by an SE at avago that you need to go to supermicro for the oem 
firmware. ftp.supermicro.com
>
>> are materially faster (but still in "host" mode as opposed to any sort
>> of "smart", "raid" or "buffered" mode) should be considered.
>>
>> The "smarter" the card the dumber the results tend to be when ZFS is in
>> use, in my experience :)
> Yes, I'm well aware of it ;)
>
> Thanks!
>
>