Re: Supermicro SAS controller
On Wed, 02 May 2012 17:49:53 +0000, Camaleón wrote:
> 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 have two cards and eight sata ports on the mainboard. With a
4xsata to sas cable I can connect another four hot swap drives and the os
drives plus cdrom.
Until now I have four 2 TB and four 1.5 TB disks. But I wanted to be able
to expand when I need more space.
>>> 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.
I have two of these cards. This makes 16 drives which can be attached to
the controllers.
>>>> 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.
Thanks for the warning. I will carefully check about the LSI 9240-4i and
the Intel 6Gb SAS expander.
I was just googling for the LSI SAS 9240-4i. It seems as it uses the same
chipset as the Intel expansion card (see post #5 in [1]).
They should be supported by the hwraid packages [2].
[1] http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1037845618
[2] http://hwraid.le-vert.net/wiki/DebianPackages
So I think this looks promising for the controller and expansion cards?
>>> 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.
Yes exactly :-)
But I should have searched infos more carefully :-?
>>>> 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 :-)
Yes, I hope I won't have any problems with them. Especially because they
too promise SuSE and Red Hat support but only have a Debian 5 driver on
their homepage.
But since the hwraid page shows good support for MegaRAID cards I'm
optimistic :-)
>>>> 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.
I think they probably are the two SAS cards
>> 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.
And these two are from the mainboard.
> 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).
I did update-pciids but the numbers didn't change. But anyhow they are
the same as on the debian wiki pci database.
Or what numbers don't match?
Best regards
Ramon
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