Moving from WHSv1 to ZFS - New Build 40TB

Similar to what you are describing. Some connected drives would not reappear when hotswapped and sometimes would fail to appear even after reboot. I did not do any thorough testing in the OS after installing the drivers and creating some zpools because by that time I intuitively decided to return them.

Here's a thread about this card misbehaving on zfs:
http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=509986&#509986
See comments:
http://www.natecarlson.com/2010/05/07/review-supermicros-sc847a-4u-chassis-with-36-drive-bays/

I recommend staying away from the cards requiring imr_sas drivers.
 
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Emulsifide said:
Define very flaky please. I bought three of them as well of which two aren't working completely (three ports dead total across the two of them). Once I figured out all of the good channels and populated them with good drives (yet another issue I'm having with my build, lol), things went pretty smoothly.
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I was stupid enought to get two of them aswell. Since I live in Norway, sending them back will be to expensive :(

If they don't work I'll just have to try to get some of my money back somehow. They were bought a few hours before the negative feedback was left... :(
 
acesea said:
I bought a bunch of m1015 cards and returned them. May have been a batch of lemons or the cards have issues. The ones that were not doa behaved very flaky in openindiana. Be advised all zfs flavors require installing the imr_sas drivers from lsi.
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Did you upgrade the firmware on any of the cards?
 
I too would like to add that I bought 2 of them. I have yet to test them though (bought before the motherboard, lol)
 
I bought 11 of them, all ports worked fine for me in Windows and Ubuntu.
Ill post back when I finish my ZFS build these are going into...
 
I saw your photo. You have a huge Norco(?) chassi with 24 disks. And you also have a PC chassi? So how do you connect everything?

You put all discs into the huge chassi. And then you use SATA cables from each disc, into your PC chassi? I dont understand.
 
This looks promising. I might have to replicate this with 10 drives to start and add another 10 in a few months. I just ordered 5 F4 2TB drives and having trouble setting them up in a RAID5 onboard my x58 mobo. It wont go over 2tb in an array... this looks to be a better alternative and futureproof than buying a $600 Areca Raid card I was looking at earlier.. I just need something good to store my media files and needs room to grow.

What kind of speeds will you be getting.. RaidZ2 looks to be the best option for a 20 drive system.. Setup in two pools of 10 each from what I've read over the last day..
 
brutalizer said:
I saw your photo. You have a huge Norco(?) chassi with 24 disks. And you also have a PC chassi? So how do you connect everything?

You put all discs into the huge chassi. And then you use SATA cables from each disc, into your PC chassi? I dont understand.
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did you read the thread at all? and since when does APC make pc cases. :rolleyes:
 
loosh said:
duplicating this build soon (ordering hardware this weekend (minus storage drives, doing that last) as long as nothing catastrophic happens) since you were aiming for the same goals as me spec wise. software wise i wanted to run freebsd and do my own zfs configuration etc.

though, looking at compatibility i noticed this; http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=4505&highlight=LSI+SAS+2008

thoughts?
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I too have been planning on a very similar build and came across the same link. This is what I've found after looking into the compatibility a bit more:

As mentioned here, the onboard SAS controller is LSI SAS2008 and if you scroll down to Device Compatibility, it will mention that FreeBSD/FreeNAS installs won't have these drivers by default except for FreeBSD 9-Current. I confirmed this by checking the support list here (look under [SAS] LSI SAS2008, you will notice it doesn't say FreeBSD support). For the OP and myself, this isn't too much of a problem as sub.mesa's ZFSGuru and Solaris support this. I confirmed that it works with ZFSGuru by checking the ZFSGuru site. Though, technically support for this chipset in ZFSGuru is recent and does have some issues/limitations, none of those are critical enough to scare me away from using it ;)

Since you plan on using FreeBSD, it might be safer to go a different motherboard and use SAS controllers. For example, it seems like the Supermicro X8SIL-F motherboard and either the Supermicro AOC-USAS-L8I Card or the Intel SASUC8I LSI 1068e Card are well supported. I'm really new to all of this though so you should probably wait until one of the more experience ZFS people post a reply. There may be other options that will allow you to still use this motherboard with FreeBSD that I don't know about.
 
Zak_ said:
New Hardware:
[...snip..]
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Sorry for the slightly older bump. Can you tell me how you mounted the 2 SSD in the case? You have 24 drives + 2 SSD (I'm assuming) boot drive. I have the 4224 and want to add in a pair for booting the system as well. All the 'spare' parts they provided looks like it's for a server/redundant power supply and not for another drive. I don't mind minor modifications if looks clean and fits.

Maybe someone else has an idea or solution. I rather use a pair of SSD or even pair of regular SATA drives in this case (just for system booting) without disturbing the 24 front hot swapable bays.

Thanks
 
Zerosum said:
Sorry for the slightly older bump. Can you tell me how you mounted the 2 SSD in the case? You have 24 drives + 2 SSD (I'm assuming) boot drive. I have the 4224 and want to add in a pair for booting the system as well. All the 'spare' parts they provided looks like it's for a server/redundant power supply and not for another drive. I don't mind minor modifications if looks clean and fits.

Maybe someone else has an idea or solution. I rather use a pair of SSD or even pair of regular SATA drives in this case (just for system booting) without disturbing the 24 front hot swapable bays.

Thanks
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I picked up a Scythe Slot Rafter:

http://www.scythe-usa.com/product/acc/064/slotrafter_detail.html

I plan to use it with SSDs, I'm not sure it has enough height for enterprise SAS but for standard height drives it will work fine.

Viper GTS
 
Baddreams said:
I don't know about that, however I just successfully flashed mine with the LSI firmware for a 9240-8i if that helps you.
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Yes you can IT mode the very cheap IBM m1015, which is the best for Solaris. But, there are different models of m1015, for instance the 46M0861 model and the 46M0831 model. This card seems perfect, as it is based on LSI2008 which plays very well with Solaris, and the LSI2008 chip has very high performance too. Strongly recommended.

I dont know if one of them models are incompatible with Solaris or if both can be flashed to IT mode, and if you ask that question, then Oddity thinks you are such an idiot and dumbass. Obviously he is very knowledgeable and knows much because he runs www.servethehome.com website but I dont see the use of being an expert when you choose to not help beginners, but instead make fun of them.

So, be careful of which model you of m1015 you use. I dont know if everyone is compatible with Solaris.



A word of caution: ZFS deduplication is STRONGLY advised not to use. Dedup is in beta phase and no one should use it. There are many people reporting of problems with dedup. Unless you have more than 1GB RAM for every TB of data and a SSD as cache, you will get abysmal performance. Never use ZFS deduplication, until it works better. It needs lot of love as of today.

ZFS compression works very well, so use that instead.


/The ZFS guru
 
hysan said:
...either the Supermicro AOC-USAS-L8I Card or the Intel SASUC8I LSI 1068e Card are well supported. I'm really new to all of this though so you should probably wait until one of the more experience ZFS people post a reply. There may be other options that will allow you to still use this motherboard with FreeBSD that I don't know about.
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Instead of using those expensive cards, use the cheap IBM m1015 model instead. It is the same LSI2008 chipset, but rebranded to IBM. You can flash it, but there are different models of this card. See my post above this one.
 
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