Do you recommend Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 as PCI-X SATA controller?

[Stephane LAPIE]

Right now I'm using this controller :

mpt0 at pci0:6:1:0:    class=0x010000 card=0x10aa1734 chip=0x00541000
rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'LSI Logic / Symbios Logic'
    device     = 'SAS1068 PCI-X Fusion-MPT SAS'
    class      = mass storage
    subclass   = SCSI
mpt1 at pci0:6:7:0:    class=0x010000 card=0x10aa1734 chip=0x00541000
rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'LSI Logic / Symbios Logic'
    device     = 'SAS1068 PCI-X Fusion-MPT SAS'
    class      = mass storage
    subclass   = SCSI

http://www.lsi.com/products/storagecomponents/Pages/LSISAS1068.aspx

The only problem is, that card is an OEM version that was a bit tricky
to find.
I got it off an auction site in Japan, but I guess it covers pretty much
what you want,
in that it will advertise disks as physical volumes by default.

My only complaint on FreeBSD 9.X so far is that,
 it has trouble doing SMART probes on the disks using passthrough :)

Performance is top notch, even though I had to tweak my /boot/loader.conf
to have a long SCSI timeout for disk detection (as you can imagine,
15 disks will take a LONG time to detect.) :
kern.cam.scsi_delay=15000

Otherwise you could pretty much shoot for this one if PCI-X is not a
requirement :

mfi0 at pci0:2:0:0:    class=0x010400 card=0x92401000 chip=0x00731000
rev=0x02 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'LSI Logic (Was: Symbios Logic, NCR)'
    class      = mass storage
    subclass   = RAID

The only real beef with this one is driver support,
as I had to make it work by using LSI's driver,
(which will require some simple patching if you plan on using it on 9.X)
and it won't handle more than one card at once as it stands.
I'm not quite aware of support status for this baby in 9.0 or 10.0.

Cheers,

On 04/05/2012 12:46 AM, Moritz Wilhelmy wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Wed, Apr 04, 2012 at 23:25:28 +0900, DarkSoul wrote:
>> I used this card for my personal ZFS NAS (2 cards, 15 disks + 1 SSD).
>>
>> http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SAT2-MV8.cfm
>>
>> Frankly speaking, this card will work 99% of the time. But it has a few
>> quirks :
>> - Sometimes, I've had a port drop because maybe of a broken/dying disk.
>>   The port would NOT recover unless I cold rebooted the server.
>>   And a port not recovering means, even the BIOS option ROM programming
>> won't find it.
>>   Quite annoying as one could guess.
>> - I could panic a system by removing a drive (back in the 8.1-RELEASE
>> days) because of thread locking/sleeping issues.
>> - I don't know what is to blame for that but :
>>  - I had more than once odd queue issues and disks flapping. Not really
>> a problem with ZFS but VERY irritating nonetheless.
>>  - I even had a whole controller drop on me once. Nothing a reboot/zpool
>> scrub couldn't fix (with NO corruption to boot!) but still...
>>  - It really, REALLY doesn't play nice with other cards. I tried
>> migrating progressively to mpt(4) cards, with a one by one switch, only
>> to experience stray NMIs and pretty ugly kernel panics. It turned out
>> having a "pure" system with two f the same kind (mind, I was not pairing
>> PCI-X and PCIe, this was in every case pure PCI-X setups) did wonders
>> for stability.
>>
>> It's probably fairly decent for most home purposes (my main use),
>> but I'd advise against it in any serious environment.
> Can you (or someone else for that matter) recommend any decent PCI-X
> controller for use in "serious environments", preferably with more than
> 4 Ports and in the same price category? :-)
> The setup is rather serious, but then again, I don't expect having to
> replace disks all the time (so if there isn't anything else that would
> cost about the same, I might just go with this one)... It affects about
> 30 users. I heard Silicon Image cards are supposed to be good?
>
> I don't need or want a hardware RAID-controller, because I'd prefer
> using software RAID (and don't want to waste the extra money).
>
>
> Best regards,
>
>     Moritz

-- 
Stephane LAPIE, EPITA SRS, Promo 2005
"Even when they have digital readouts, I can't understand them."
--MegaTokyo


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