Re: Supermicro SAS controller
On 5/2/2012 11:30 AM, Ramon Hofer wrote:
> On Tue, 01 May 2012 15:43:13 -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
>
>> On 5/1/2012 12:37 PM, Ramon Hofer wrote:
>>
>>> I have the RPC-4220 case with 20 howswap slots.
>>
>> You should have mentioned this sooner, as there is a better solution
>> than buying 3 of the 9211-8i, which is $239*3= $717. And you end up
>> with one SFF8087 port wasted.
>>
>> Instead, get a 24 port Intel 6Gb SAS expander:
>> http://www.provantage.com/intel-res2sv240~7ITSP0V8.htm $238.24
>>
>> and the LSI 9240-4i, same LSISAS2008 chip as the 9211-8i:
>> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118129 $189.99
>>
>> Total: $429
>>
>> W/4 extra SFF8087 cables (assuming you already have 2):
>> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816116093 $60
>>
>> Total: $489
>>
>> This solution connects all 20 drives on all 5 backplanes to the HBA, and
>> will give you ~1.5GB/s read throughput with 20 7.2k RPM drives using md
>> RAID 5/6, and ~800MB/s with hardware or md RAID10.
>>
>> You connect the SFF8087 of the LSI card to port 0 of the SAS exapander.
>> You then connect the remaining 5 ports to the 5 SFF8087 ports on the 5
>> backplanes.
>
> Thanks alot for the suggestions. I have found a shop where I live and
> will order them tomorrow. Do you have experience with these cards?
Hi Ramon,
Yes. Note that the Intel SAS expander has a PCIe x4 edge connector on
the PCB and it also has a standard 4 pin Molex connector. The PCB has
mounting holes to allow mounting it directly to your chassis via
motherboard style brass or plastic stand-offs. This method may likely
require drilling holes in your chassis. I often use this method to
avoid wasting a PCIe slot. If you have plenty of free PCIe x4/8/16
slots mount it in one as it's much easier. Note only power is drawn
from the PCIe slot. There is no data xfer. Data xfer occurs only via
the SFF8087 ports. Here's the manual:
http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/e93121003_res2sv240_hwug.pdf
Nice picture and info:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/servers/raid/raid-controller-res2sv240.html
Using the LSI 9240-4i HBA will be very similar to using the SuperMicro
Marvell based SAS card, but better. Simply enter the BIOS at boot and
configure the drives as you wish. This card is a real hardware RAID
controller, not fakeraid, so you can use it as such. It simply lacks
cache memory and the more advanced RAID features of LSI's higher end
RAID cards. You can even install Debian onto and boot directly from a
RAID volume on this card. If you wish to use mdraid instead, configure
the drives as JBOD so md can see the individual drives.
If you choose to use the hardware RAID feature, note that you can have a
maximum of 16 drives per RAID volume. Thus, if you have 20 drives in
that chassis, you'd want to create two RAID5 or two RAID10 volumes. If
you use a separate boot/OS drive, you can do two hardware RAID5 arrays,
then create an md linear or RAID0 array of these two hardware volumes so
you have a single file system across all the drives. Lots of
possibilities. All the info you could want/need for the 9240 is here:
http://www.lsi.com/products/storagecomponents/Pages/MegaRAIDSAS9240-4i.aspx
--
Stan
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