Dell R230's + ZFS via PERC

[Trond Endrestøl]

On Fri, 18 Nov 2016 20:10-0000, Paul Macdonald wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> We're buying a few of theDell  R230's now,
> 
> The R230's however, whilst having nice 4 x hotswappable bays) have only a
> single sata port on the borard and everything goes via the PERC card.
> 
> ( the R220's had awful ACPI problems which muck up serial access)
> 
> A lot of these are single SSD systems with a few mirrored sata + L2 SSD's for
> caching
> 
> I've read that ZFS prefers direct access to the disks, does anyone have
> info/insight as to running zfs via these percs?

We bought a R320 with the H310 Mini PERC last year. The server runs 
stable/10 amd64. I managed to convince the PERC to run in JBOD mode. 
The four drives are exposed as /dev/mfisyspd0, /dev/mfisyspd1, 
/dev/mfisyspd2, and /dev/mfisyspd3.

ZFS hasn't complained so far, but the mfi driver complains every now 
and then about not being allowed to run patrol read:

mfi0: 1063 (531025200s/0x0020/WARN) - Patrol Read can't be started, as PDs are either not ONLINE, or are in a VD with an active process, or are in an excluded VD

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