6.2-BETA2 Dell PE1950

[Doug Ambrisko]

Scott Long writes:
| Doug Ambrisko wrote:
| > Fredrik Widlund writes:
| > | An update, right now the BCE nic seems to work, I'm not sure exactly why
| > | yet. I'm attaching the dmesg however.
| > | 
| > | SAS adapter is the PERC 5I, which is handled by the MPT driver in
| > | 6.2-Beta2. I'll continue to look at this. There are some unhandled
| > | events (0x12, 0x16), but these might not be needed.
| > 
| > You might be confused here.  PERC stands for "Power Edge RAID Controller"
| > which is the LSI RAID card.  It is supported via the mfi driver.  The
| > MPT driver supports the non-RAID SAS card.  Okay it can do some RAID
| > but really isn't a RAID card like the real RAID card.  I do have a
| > card that is the SAS controller but I haven't played with it much.
| > I did play with it a little to figure out a different problem and
| > now it sits on my desk.
| 
| The confusion is actually on Dell's end.  They've overloaded the 'PERC'
| term to mean both software and hardware RAID.  You can build out a
| 1950 or 2950 with an MPT SAS card instead of an MFI SAS-RAID card, but
| they will still tell you that you are getting 'PERC RAID'.  The power
| of marketeers.  Anyways, I _think_ that the 'i' in 'PERC 5i' is the
| indicator that it is software RAID, and thus just an MPT chip doing
| its 'integrated mirror' feature.

Call me confused then since when I read the POST stuff coming up
on during the BIOS the non-RAID card says Dell SAS 5 versus
PERC 5/i which matches what I read on Dell's web site.

So Dell SAS for the 9G should be the mpt driver and the Dell PERC for the
9G should be mfi.  In theory the 2900/2950/1950/1900 are all the same in this
regard since they share the same components but different cases & risers.

Doug A.