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...
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.
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?
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.