Re: Supermicro SAS controller
On Tue, 01 May 2012 17:29:17 +0000, Ramon Hofer wrote:
> On Tue, 01 May 2012 16:16:07 +0000, Camaleón wrote:
>
>> 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.
Ah, okay. This one:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Core/P67/C7P67.cfm
The board has no SAS ports but it features 8 SATA ports (4 SATA2 and 4
SATA3), aren't those enough your your purpose? :-?
> 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.
Well, the driver status for most of the hardware out there can be
"misleading" many times. This is like a double-sided sword, you have
to carefully read the technical specs of the device to find out the
chipset it uses and then, search for its status in the kernel. If you
rely on hardware manufacturer's driver you are stuck: they can drop it
at any time or don't compile for your linux distribution version, which
seems to be this case :-(
> So performance isn't very important. But I don't know what exactly you
> mean by expectations.
Well, I wonder why is that you chose to go with SAS drives instead using
SATA given that the motehrboard only has SATA ports. When someone adds
a SAS controller is usually because he/she wnats to build a mainstream
server or expectes more performance/reliability than the average :-)
> 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.
Okay... I'll ask you again: why a SAS controller instead using the
embedded SATA ports?
> 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.
This leads me to another question. Why RAID 1 for a media server?
> 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?
Okay, let's see what we have for now:
- A motherboard with 8 SATA ports
- A 4U case with up to 20 hot-swap drive bays for the disks (SATA/SAS)
I wonder why is that you have not considered using SATA hard disks :-)
>> 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...
It could be...
>> 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
Too much hassle/problems for a simple raid5 volume :-(
>>> 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...
Glag it's more stable now with an updated kernel but I'd be keep monitoring
the array during some days... and if you experience another issue with the
disks, I would reconsider in replacing the hard disk controller or moving to
SATA disks, instead.
>> 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.
Oh. Hope all went well O:-)
> But I'm confused about the two different versions too. lspci shows:
(I'm copying the rest of the message here)
> 01:00.0 RAID bus controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.
> MV64460/64461/64462 System Controller, Revision B (rev 01)
Well, lspci should display two different sets for the hard disk controller:
the SAS adapter (Marvell 88SE6480) and the motherboard embedded chipset
(Marvell 88SE9128) but none of these two matches with the lscpi output :-?
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
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