Controller for ZFS

[Steven Hartland]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom Evans" <tevans.uk at googlemail.com>
To: "Borja Marcos" <borjam at sarenet.es>
Cc: "freebsd-fs at FreeBSD.org" <freebsd-fs at freebsd.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2013 11:56 AM
Subject: Re: Controller for ZFS


> On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 10:49 AM, Borja Marcos <borjam at sarenet.es> wrote:
>> The one I use is sold by Dell as the "H200". They usually try to disuade you by saying that it's not intelligent, doesn't
>> offer RAID, some of their "configuration aids" even forbid it... I just tell the salesman to shut up because I know much better 
>> than him.
>
> The one I use was labelled as "Dell 6GB SAS HBA" (I got it from ebay,
> ~$100) with 2 external mini-SAS connectors. This could then be flashed
> with LSI's own firmware to 9211-8i-IT firmware (it doesn't seem to
> care how the ports are configured). These are then hooked up to a
> couple of 16 bay enclosures with SAS expanders.
>
> This then gives you the perfect ZFS HBA, no more configuration
> required. Each drive attached appears as /dev/daN.
>
> (One warning, if your system is EFI, then LSI's DOS, linux and FreeBSD
> based flash utils will not work, you'll get a message about "Failed to
> initialise PAL". Put the card in a BIOS based system, or (much harder)
> boot an EFI shell and use LSI's EFI utils instead)
>
>>
>> The only problem: beware if you are using a built-in backplane in the server, some manufacturers insist on using different
>> cabling schemes for different controllers and you could run into stupid problems because of that.
>>
>> FreeBSD 10 identifies one of my cards as this one:
>> mps0: <LSI SAS2008> port 0x7c00-0x7cff mem 0xd4ff0000-0xd4ffffff,0xd4f80000-0xd4fbffff irq 80 at device 0.0 on pci67
>> mps0: Firmware: 07.15.08.00, Driver: 16.00.00.00-fbsd
>
> This is quite old firmware, do you not have problems with this
> (particularly large drives or SSDs)? I believe I am using 15, and the
> latest is 16.

Latest is actually P17 for LSI SAS2008's

Watch out for Dell kit we just found their chassis can't support
SATA 3 in our case the Dell C6220 even though the card we specified
(LSI 9210-8i which is also a 2008 based card) can and does support
SATA 3.

Behavour is some of the disk bays randomly disconnect due phys
CRC errors which testing seems to indicate is a problem with
the midplane in the chassis.

This has been confirmed with retail Seagate Contellation.2 HDD's,
Samsung 840 Pro and Kingston HyperX SSD's.

Note: Dells OEM Constellation.2 disks are artificially limited
to SATA 2, possibly to avoid this very issue?

We currently have an open support case with Dell but its unclear
at this time if there will be a resolution as they seem to strongly
follow the "Its not a certified disk" line.

    Regards
    Steve 


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