SAS Controller again

[Josef Grosch]

Andrea Venturoli wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> In my search for a SAS controller, I've been offered an Adaptec ASR3405 
> or ASR3805. These are not supported in 6.2R, but it looks like they will 
> be in upcoming 6.3R by the aac driver.
> I'd like to know about ground experiences with these cards. Do they work 
> well? Does aaccli allow for production-time online check and array rebuild?
> Any trouble?
> 
>  bye & Thanks
>     av.

We use the Adaptec 3805 here at Juniper with great success. The 3805 and 
15K SAS drives are damn fast. We are very happy with them, however there 
are a few caveat.

* The Adaptec driver in FreeBSD 6.2 does not understand what a 3805 is. 
Adaptec has released an update to the driver in source code. It is on 
their web site. There are several people who work at Juniper who have 
the commit bit so we are going to try and get the updated driver into 
the tree before 6.3.

In the mean time, in order to install 6.2 with a 3805 one needs to 
install the driver at install time off of a floppy or a USB driver. Then 
either copy the kernel driver into /boot/kernel or recompile the kernel 
with the new driver. It's a little bit of a pain but once it's you can 
forget about it.

* The early versions of this card had a nasty bug in the firmware. When 
the card was put under a heavy load the card would stall and timeout. 
Adaptec has released an update to the firmware on their web site. The 
update is a bootable ISO image. Updating the firmware requires one to 
reboot the system with the bootable CD then updating the firmware using 
the supplied program.

* Aaccli, which is in the ports tree, does not understand what a 3805 
is. Adaptec has a replacement program on their web site but I have only 
played around with it and not spent a lot of time with this tool. I 
would guess that it has all the same functionality that aaccli had.



Josef

-- 
FreeBSD 6.2         |
Josef Grosch        | Last night I was laying in bed, looking up at the
jgrosch at juniper.net | stars, and wondering, "Where the hell is my roof"