Re: Need SAS HBA for Debian Jessie
On Monday, May 18, 2015 at 5:40:05 AM UTC-5, Petter Adsen wrote:
> On Sat, 16 May 2015 05:38:30 -0700 (PDT)
> I am sorry if this is a dumb question,
Not at all.
> but if this is a home system,
> why can you not go for more commodity hardware? While I do recognize
> there are differences between SAS and SATA, do you really need SAS in
> a home setting - for a media library? SATA may be the simplest/cheapest
> solution, to my way of thinking.
Not so much beyond about 10 drives. That said, this system was eSATA based for a long time, but it has been having issues. In my efforts to troubleshoot the problems, I converted my 20 drive chassis from eSATA Port Multipliers to multi-lane. It has solved some of the issues, but not all.
> I would assume there are far more people running Linux with a SATA
> system than there are for SAS, so it should be more widely tested, and
> information would not be so scarce. Granted, this might be less true
> when you are talking about high-end RAID controllers, but still.
True enough,but many of the issues seem to have been related to the two systems being eSATA.
> Here I agree with you. OTOH, if this had been for a "enterprise"
> setting, a suggestion to check out RH - with their level of commercial
> support - would not necessarily be a bad one.
I wouldn't say it was bad, anyway, just not in step with the reasons one would be posting in this forum in the first place.
> Again, I agree. In this scenario, I would find a couple of controllers
> that would seem to suit my purpose, and contact the manufacturers
> directly with very specific questions.
That is much easier said than done. Even companies who have people manning the phones often have people in those positions who are clueless beyong what is already on the web.
> One of these questions would be
> whether or not the controller is supported by the Linux kernel itself,
The kernel is not so much the issue. Most cards are supported out of the box by the kernel on Jessie. It is the management software that is usually a problem. If they don't want to bother to support all sorts of different distros, then they should provide open source management software.
> This is just personal preference, but I would as far as possible avoid
> hardware that isn't supported by the Linux kernel itself, since that
> would leave me at the mercy of the manufacturer with regard to future
> support and updates.
I agree I don't want hardware not supported in the kernel (or vice-versa, if you like), but that is only part of the problem, typically the smaller part.
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