ZFS Advice

[Wes Morgan]

On Wed, 6 Aug 2008, Peter Schuller wrote:

>> The AoC-SAT2-MV8 is based on the "Marvell Hercules-2 Rev. C0 SATA host
>> controller", which seems to be AKA 88SX6081, which is listed as
>> supported by the ata driver in 7.0-RELEASE.  Has anyone had any ZFS
>> experience with it?
>
> Yes; it has been working quite fine for me with 7 up to a release-candidate.
> In 7.0-RELEASE you must disable the hptrr driver because it eats the device.
> See:
>
>   http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/120615
>   http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/120842
>
> When I say "working fine", this is with 8 SATA drives (6 of them in a raidz2,
> two of them for other stuff) and not having any issues like corruption,
> timeouts or whatever else people have had with shaky controllers.
>
> However, I cannot speak to performance because it's a PCI-X card that I've
> plugged into a PCI slow, so throughput is limited by the PCI bus (and the
> machine is otherwise not the fastest to begin with).
>
> Note that this is on 32 bit; haven't been able to try it on 64 bit because I
> the PCI-X card wouldn't work on the motherboard (again PCI, so it's
> hit-and-miss) where I would otherwise have tried it.
>
> I'd love to find a buyable PCI-E version that also worked in FreeBSD... I'll
> see if the link in your post contains any such hints.

Hmmm... That PCI-X card is interesting. Supermicro also lists this:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-USAS-L8i.cfm

http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/standard_product_ics/sas_ics/lsisas1068e/index.html

Not much onboard ram, but it's PCI-E and even SAS. CDW lists it for $155. 
That would be cheaper than buying a new board with a PCI-X slot or two, 
and would even handle SAS drives. Claims to be based on the "LSISAS 1068E 
SAS controller". Any idea if that is supported? I don't see it listed in 
the mfi man page. LSI has a Linux driver for download. That card looks 
like it would be just what I need.