Re: SAS/SATA controllers: 8 port that support 8TB Drives

On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 05:55:50PM -0500, Larry Rosenman wrote:
| On 06/17/2022 5:48 pm, Michael Gmelin wrote:
| >> On 18. Jun 2022, at 00:31, Alexander Motin <mav@freebsd.org> wrote:
| >> 
| >> 
| >> 
| >>> On 17.06.2022 18:24, Alexander Motin wrote:
| >>>> On 17.06.2022 18:16, Larry Rosenman wrote:
| >>>> On 06/17/2022 5:08 pm, Alexander Motin wrote:
| >>>>> On 17.06.2022 11:59, Larry Rosenman wrote:
| >>>>>> I'm looking to upgrade the controllers in my TrueNAS box to 
| >>>>>> something that will
| >>>>>> support 8TB drives because apparently my LSI 2108 controllers do 
| >>>>>> not support 8TB drives.
| >>>>>> 
| >>>>>> What's the communities recommendation?
| >>>>>> needs to support SFF connectors for a total of 4 SFF connectors, 
| >>>>>> as I have 16 slots.
| >>>>> 
| >>>>> We at iX are still using LSI/Broadcom HBAs, just moved from long
| >>>>> discontinued mps(4) to newer mpr(4).  And I don't believe the 
| >>>>> problem
| >>>>> is directly related to capacity.  According to my observations it 
| >>>>> may
| >>>>> be Seagate HDDs of/above certain (8TB) generation.  We do not use
| >>>>> Seagate HDDs in our products, so about that instability I only 
| >>>>> heard
| >>>>> from forums and TrueNAS community user reports.
| >>>> 
| >>>> This is a mfi(4) set of controllers, and a ST80000Nm0045 8TB (CMR) 
| >>>> drive.
| >>>> 
| >>>> Is this a bad combo?
| >>>> 
| >>>> mfi0: 9973 (708793330s/0x0002/WARN) - PD 00(e0xfc/s3) is not 
| >>>> supported
| >>>> (probe0:mfi0:0:0:0): INQUIRY. CDB: 12 00 00 00 24 00
| >>>> (probe0:mfi0:0:0:0): CAM status: CCB request completed with an error
| >>>> (probe0:mfi0:0:0:0): Retrying command, 3 more tries remain
| >>>> (probe0:mfi0:0:0:0): INQUIRY. CDB: 12 00 00 00 24 00
| >>>> (probe0:mfi0:0:0:0): CAM status: CCB request completed with an error
| >>>> (probe0:mfi0:0:0:0): Retrying command, 2 more tries remain
| >>>> (probe0:mfi0:0:0:0): INQUIRY. CDB: 12 00 00 00 24 00
| >>>> (probe0:mfi0:0:0:0): CAM status: CCB request completed with an error
| >>>> (probe0:mfi0:0:0:0): Retrying command, 1 more tries remain
| >>>> (probe0:mfi0:0:0:0): INQUIRY. CDB: 12 00 00 00 24 00
| >>>> (probe0:mfi0:0:0:0): CAM status: CCB request completed with an error
| >>>> (probe0:mfi0:0:0:0): Retrying command, 0 more tries remain
| >>>> (probe0:mfi0:0:0:0): INQUIRY. CDB: 12 00 00 00 24 00
| >>>> (probe0:mfi0:0:0:0): CAM status: CCB request completed with an error
| >>>> (probe0:mfi0:0:0:0): Error 5, Retries exhausted
| >>>> 
| >>>> mfi0 Physical Drives:
| >>>>   0 (  932G) UNCONFIGURED GOOD <ST8000NM0045-1RL UG07 
| >>>> serial=ZA1AC912> SATA E1:S3
| >>> mfi(4) are RAIDs, not HBAs.  We do not recommend RAIDs with TrueNAS 
| >>> due to problems with hot-plug, disk identification, etc. and so have 
| >>> limited experience with them.  But I know some of LSI RAIDs can be 
| >>> reflashed into equivalent HBAs, so if they share the hardware, I can 
| >>> speculate that they may share some issues.
| >> 
| >> I've just noticed "932G" instead of "8000G".  It is obviously a bigger 
| >> problem than what we heard for HBAs.  It looks like a kind of problems 
| >> that should not happen to HBAs, since they should not care about disk 
| >> capacity.
| >> 
| > 
| > What does `smartctl -a <device>` report (especially sector sizes)?
| > 
| > -m
| > 
| > 
| >> --
| >> Alexander Motin
| >> 
| It's not even making a mfid* node (it is a 4Kn disk)

FYI, mfi never got support for 4Kn drives and is hard coded to 512.  mrsas
does have support so that is better to use for 4Kn and newer controllers.
My day job isn't in that area anymore.  I looked a bit as what it would
take to support 4Kn in mfi and that required a bunch of things and structures
to figure it out.

Doug A.