Recent content by dubslick

Backblaze just released their reliability findings with 27,000 drives, some as old as 4 years. Is that enough of a sample size?

Instead of powering down then up, how about putting the drives to sleep after long periods (30 minutes or so) of being idle? Is that just as harsh?

You can flash the card with the LSI IT firmware without RAID capability, turning the card into a plain Host Bus Adapter with 8 SATA ports. For systems running ZFS, this is the preferred way to attach drives, without RAID.

This post inspired me to try the SAS 6/ir again. Following your example, I was able to flash the LSI 1.28.02 IT firmware onto the card, and it is happily controlling a ZFS zroot mirror for FreeBSD. Not bad for $36 bucks. It also uses half the power of the SAS 5/i card (5W vs 10W).

Hi Sub.mesa, Any plans to help ease configuration when dealing with drive spindown? It's a little confusing in freeBSD with ATA versus AHCI, atacontrol/camcontrol, ataidle. Things related to help lower power consumption, such as powerd, cpufreq, sysctl dev.cpu settings might be helpful, or do...

No, nothing special. I just didn't try the old firmware since I had a Dell SAS 5/i on the way, and knew it would work in IT mode out of the box.

Wow, that's great! The reason I returned my SAS 6/iR was because I couldn't flash the newest IT firmware onto it. If other people can repeat, then this would be a cheap way to add 8 SATA ports, a better value than the often recommend Supermicro LSI 1068 UIO card.

Did you flash the IR or IT firmware? I wanted a plain HBA without RAID, so I tried IT, and it didn't work. Was it the latest firmware?

Look at this post about the Dell PERC 5/i and look for the section about the pin tape-mod, under the section "SMBus Issue with Intel Chipsets". I had a SAS 6/iR and was unable to flash the latest LSI firmware onto it (LSI SAS3081E-R, 1.29.00.00). It said something about "Wrong Vendor Code". I...

Hey sub.mesa, what is your opinion on mirrored ZFS root for FreeBSD? It seems OpenSolaris and and Nexenta encourage a mirrored ZFS root/rpool, and their installers make it pretty easy to do. BTW, thanks for your FreeBSD/ZFS guides. I've found them very helpful, coming from a Linux and Solaris...

Reviving an old thread... I picked up the Biostar TA760G motherboard with some unbuffered ECC DDR2 from Kingston and had the same memtest86+ results as Kamgusta: ECC detect/correct on, Chipkill off. I then put the same ECC modules onto a A760G (smaller version of motherboard with only 2 DIMM...

My motherboard, a Biostar TA760G M2+, supports ECC chipkill if your modules use 4-bit chips. However, unbuffered ECC DDR2 modules from the usual suspects (Crucial, Kingston), use 8-bit chips. Has anyone seen unbuffered ECC DDR2 modules using 4-bit chips? Do they even exist?

Has anyone used a Dell SAS 6/i? Seems like a Dell SAS 5/i, but with 8 ports.

There's a recent-ish discussion about using a low power cpu/motherboard with ECC on silentpcreview. Biostar A760G-M2+ - 30W barrier broken

Actually, TLER/ERC/CCTL can be an issue for ZFS Thank you for this! I've been looking for a way to set TLER/ERC/CCTL through linux and not through hdat2.