Re: Supermicro SAS controller
On Wed, 02 May 2012 16:19:40 +0000, Ramon Hofer wrote:
> On Wed, 02 May 2012 14:21:36 +0000, Camaleón wrote:
>> 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.
But you are still physically limited to the eight-ports provided by the
add-on card, right? :-?
>> 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).
Okay, I didn't realize you were planning to use all of the available hard
disk trays of the case :-)
But then, you will need SAS controller with expansion capabilities, don't
you? I maybe overlooked but the SuperMicro SAS controller you first
pointed out does not seem to support more than 8 devices.
>>> 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 ;-)
Okay :-)
Just let me add a note of warning here: whatever SAS/SATA card you
finally choose, ensure that has support for big hard disks (>2-3TiB) just
in case, because this information is not usually displayed on the specs.
>> 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.
Ah, so your plan was adding two of this eight-port SAS addon card to get
a total of 16 hard disks.
>>> 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, yes. I can't tell for that specific model but LSI is a good
manufacturer for HBA solutions and also linux-friendly, at least that's
what I've heard :-)
>>> 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 :-)
He, he.. good move :-)
>>> 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 :-?
Mmm, yes, there's something strange there. Ah, I think I got it :-)
> $ sudo lspci | grep Marvel
> 01:00.0 RAID bus controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MV64460/64461/64462 System Controller, Revision B (rev 01)
This can be the motherboard SATA 2 controller.
> 02:00.0 RAID bus controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MV64460/64461/64462 System Controller, Revision B (rev 01)
This can be the SAS add-on card.
> 03:00.0 SATA controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9123 PCIe SATA 6.0 Gb/s controller (rev 11)
This is the motherboard SATA 3 controller.
> 03:00.1 IDE interface: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Device 91a4 (rev 11)
And finally, this is the IDE/ATA port of the motherboard.
Does this make more sense? Yes, exact numbers do not match but this can be
due to a simple identification problem ("update-pciids" could solve this).
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
Reply to: