[nycbug-talk] cheap way to add drives to a 1U?

[Charles Sprickman]

On Thu, 29 Oct 2009, Jonathan wrote:

> On 10/28/2009 11:15 PM, Charles Sprickman wrote:
>> On Wed, 28 Oct 2009, Pete Wright wrote:
>>
>>> sun just released a patch to solaris 10 that allows you to drop in SSD
>>> drives into your zpool config which can be used as caches which
>>> in theory should give similar benefits of RAID controllers with BBU's.
>>> but thats solaris not in fbsd yet...soon hopefully though :)
>>
>> What host adapters are you using on the FBSD boxes?  Some time ago I was
>> cautioned against basically all Highpoint and SIIS cards on -stable.  It's
>> pretty slim pickings once you take those brands out of the mix.
>
> I've had good luck with my LSI SAS controller [1] even with standard
> SATA consumer drives.

Not a bad price at all ($209):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118100&Tpk=LSI%20SAS%203081E-R


> I believe I saw something about a new management tool for FreeBSD 
> recently but I haven't had to change anything for a couple of years so I 
> haven't looked into it.  I know having to go into the card BIOS to make 
> changes was a major blocking point for a long while for some people.

Yeah, I think it's going to be in 8.0, but Scott Long pointed me to it 
saying it would work on 7.2, and it does.  It's in the FBSD svn repo 
somewhere, the tool is "mptutil".  I'm using it without issue on a 
Dell-badged LSI RAID controller:

mpt0: <LSILogic SAS/SATA Adapter> port 0xec00-0xecff mem 
0xfe9fc000-0xfe9fffff,0xfe9e0000-0xfe9effff irq 16 at device 8.0 on pci2
mpt0: [ITHREAD]
mpt0: MPI Version=1.5.13.0
mpt0: Capabilities: ( RAID-0 RAID-1E RAID-1 )

> On a related note does anyone know of SAS or SATA port multipliers that
> work with FBSD for <$10 dollars/port?

There was this thread on -stable recently, it looks like support is a work 
in progress...

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2009-October/052441.html

> I can't speak for SIIS but I bought a 2 port highpoint SATA controller
> years ago that gave me silent data corruption, thankfully  I still had
> alternate copies of my data.  I haven't gone near highpoint hardware since.

It's just a gut feeling, but Highpoint and SIIS seem like very low-end 
PC-modder type toys.  Thanks for the LSI tip though, I'm a bit more 
trusting of them.

C

> Jonathan
>
> [1]
> http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/host_bus_adapters/sas_hbas/internal/sas3081e-r/index.html
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