Re: Supermicro SAS controller
On Wed, 02 May 2012 14:21:36 +0000, Camaleón wrote:
> 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? :-?
Yes, that's the mainboard I got.
The case has two places to add os drives, one for a cdrom and 20 hot
swapable disks.
It was available with either SAS or SATA connectors. But I would have
needed 23 SATA connectors on the mainboard or addon cards.
The case with 5 SAS connectors was available and the SATA one had much
later delivery date so I went for the SAS case.
>> 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 :-(
Sounds very true :-(
>> 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 :-)
Since I couldn't find any mainboards with more than 20 SATA ports and
enough slots for addon cards (1x PCI, 2x PCI-Ex1 only for the tv cards).
>> 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?
To be honest just because the case was ready at the dealer...
>> 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?
Just because the case has two places for os disks. But on the other hand
it's seems to be interesting to set up a bootable raid1. And because it's
calming to have the safety of the raid as it serves all the media I have:
MythTV, LogitechMediaServer, etc. So my family relies on it and isn't
amused when the system is down ;-)
>> 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 :-)
Besides the fact of the longer delivery because I couldn't find cheaper
solution than the two Supermicro SAS cards. The rest of the disks and
optical drive.
>>> 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 :-(
Yes, with my first system I had more luck to set it up: No problems iny
any way at all :-)
>>>> 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.
Thanks.
I think I'll go with the solution Stan posted (LSI 9240-4i and Intel SAS
expander).
>>> 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:-)
Yes, I hope to be able to sell them to Windows users :-)
>> 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 :-?
You're right:
http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=JQtrS5J2
Why don't they match :-?
Best regards
Ramon
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