Re: Supermicro SAS controller
On Tue, 01 May 2012 16:16:07 +0000, Camaleón wrote:
>> Can you recommend something better?
>> It was very nice because it's quite cheap and I don't need a hardware
>> raid card.
>
> "Cheap" and "nice" do not usually came together, or to put it well,
> "cheap" and "good performance" do not usually match :-)
>
> What kind of hardware do you have (motherboard brand and model) and what
> kind of hard disk controller do you need, what are your expectations?
>
> SuperMicro boards (I'm also a SuperMicro user) are usually good enough
> to use their embedded SAS/SATA ports, at least if you want to use a
> software raid solution :-?
I have a Supermicro C7P67 board. But there aren't any SAS connectors
there.
This is a home media server. Earlier I used a debian box with a raid and
a disk for mythtv recordings. But I ran out of space and resurrected an
ReadyNas NV+. But this was so slow and I wanted to have everything
centralized. So I was looking for something else and found this case:
http://cybershop.ri-vier.nl/4u-rackmnt-server-case-w20-hotswap-satasas-
drv-bays-rpc4220-p-18.html
They also had that SAS controller and on the Supermicro website they
wrote it would be SUSE and Red Hat compatible. So I thought it runs too
under Debian.
So performance isn't very important. But I don't know what exactly you
mean by expectations. The controller should give access to the disks.
They will mostly be slow green drives. It's not even a very big problem
if it's limited to 3 TB but of course it would be nice if I could also go
bigger in some years when I run out of space again and want to add
another raid.
So the media server contains one analogue PCI tuner card (PVR-500) and
one (maybe in future a second one will be added) TeVii (S480) sat tuner
card.
Now I have one 500 GB disk as system drive but I'm thinking of adding
another one as RAID1.
With the 20 hot swap slots in the case, the two system drives and an
optical drive I need 23 sata connectors. Or better four SAS connectors
and the eight SATA ports on the mainboard.
I think software raid will cause me less cost and problem because when
the controller fails I can replace it by anything that can talk SAS?
>>>> And I can access the disks. Create an ext3 and ext4 filesystem on
>>>> them seperately. But they don't like be be in the raid.
>>>>
>>>> When the system crashed I got this dmesg but I can't find anything in
>>>> there:
>>>> http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=ZFdkcS8p
>>>
>>> There are some interesting entries there:
>>>
>>> [ 12.028337] md: md1 stopped.
> (...)
>>> [ 12.035275] raid5: raid level 5 set md1 active with 2 out of 3
>>> devices, algorithm 2
>>>
>>> Those are related to md1 and your raid5 volume.
>>
>> And this looks ok or is there a problem?
>
> Well, I'm not familiar with MD (I use hardware raid) but "md1 stopped"
> and raid 5 with only 2 elements in the array does not sound very good
> ;-(
Ah, yes you're right :-o
Was this during bootup? I recreated the array again after bootup...
>>>> On the screen I saw this:
>>>> http://666k.com/u.php
>>>> (Sorry it's a photograph)
>>>
>>> I can't load the image :-?
>>
>> Sorry I posted the wrong link. This one should work:
>>
>> http://666kb.com/i/c3f6nbmalagytqujw.jpg
>
> Ugh... and when is that happening, I mean, that "I/O error"? At install
> time, when partitioning, after the first boot?
This usually happens when I tried to create the filesystem on the raid
array by
sudo mkfs.ext4 -c -L test-device-1 /dev/md1
And when I then want to see details about the array (sudo mdadm --detail /
dev/md1) the system crashes and I get the I/O error.
This causes so much problem that I wasn't able to repair it when it
happened the first time (afterwards I had nothing to recover ;-) ).
I posted it here:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2012/04/msg01290.html
>>>> What else can I do?
>>>
>>> I would report it, although I'm afraid this is a well-known issue.
>>
>> Where should I report it?
>
> I would try firt in Debian BTS, against the kernel package.
>
>> I've written a mail to Supermicro. Should I also create a Debian bug
>> report?
>
> Yup, tough I think it will be forwarded upstream.
Thanks I will run reportbug.
But in the meantime I have installed the bpo kernel and it seems to be
working now...
At least it never run the disk check for so long, the raid is rebuilding
and I can see the details as much as I want...
>>> Sadly, Supermicro does not build binaries for Debian/Ubuntu but maybe
>>> you can ask them for the sources to compile the driver by your own.
>>
>> I found this pages:
>>
>> ftp://ftp.supermicro.nl/driver/SAS/Marvell/MV8/SAS1/Driver/
Linux/3.1.0.7/
>>
>> But it doesn't seem as if it's what I need.
>
> Mmm, your addon card is based on Marvell 6480 chipset, those packages
> are for Marvell Odin(88SE64xx) as the README file says. Maybe you need
> to look here, instead:
>
> ftp://ftp.supermicro.nl/driver/SAS/Marvell/MV8/SAS2/
>
> But it doesn't matter because these are also rpm based packages.
>
>> And the supermicro support sent me the link to this zip file:
>>
>> ftp://ftp.supermicro.nl/driver/SAS/Marvell/MV8/SAS1/Firmware/3.1.0.21/
Firmware_3.1.0.21.zip
>>
>> It contains some win files and I have no clue what to do with them. So
>> I hope I get an answer from them what to do with it...
>
> Mmm, then the above FTP link you sent was correct, weird...
>
> Well, that ZIP file is for updating the "firmware" of the card, not the
> driver. You should not update it unless you are completely sure about
> what you are doing, and even more when there's data on the array. Also,
> ensure that's the correct firmware version for you card...
You're about an hour too late :-o
But I already had the newest firmware on the card.
But I'm confused about the two different versions too.
lspci shows:
Best regards
Ramon
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