On Tue, 01 May 2012 10:57:47 -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote:

> On 5/1/2012 6:53 AM, Ramon Hofer wrote:
>> Hi all
>>
>> I'm using Debian Squeeze and would like to use a Supermicro
>> AOC-SASLP-MV8 as controller for a software raid.
>
> The mvsas Linux driver has never been ready for production, unless
> things have dramatically changed very recently. The AOC-SASLP-MV8 will
> work fine on a MS Windows machine, but you will continue to suffer many
> nightmares with Linux. Google for the mvsas horror stories.
>
>> What else can I do?
>
> Ebay that card and acquire one that will simply work:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118112 This LSI
> card supports 6Gb SAS/SATA3 and 3TB+ drives.

Thanks alot!


> If you have x4 PCIe slots but not x8/x16, then get the Intel card:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816117141

Nono, I have enough x16 slots. The x4 slots aren't enough.



> People buy this SM card because it's the cheapest thing on the planet
> with 2xSFF8087 ports (without first looking up its reputation). If the
> dual SFF8087 cards above are beyond your budget, go with 2 Silicon Image
> based 4 port cards with plain SATA connectors:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124027
>
> If you don't have a backplane with SFF8087 connectors, simply use 4
> regular SATA cables with the SiI cards. If you do have a backplane, buy
> 2 new 4 port SATA to SFF8087 2ft reverse breakout cables:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816116101
>
> The LSI card is $239, will give far superior performance, and will work
> with your current cables. The 2xSiI cards is $120, $154 w/cables.
> Either have great Linux compatibility.

Thanks you very much!!!

I have the RPC-4220 case with 20 howswap slots. So I can only go for the
LSI card. But when this means no more such problems I'm more than
happy :-)


Thanks again!



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Sorry I hit ctrl + enter or something and the message went out...

On Tue, 01 May 2012 17:29:17 +0000, Ramon Hofer wrote:

> But I'm confused about the two different versions too. lspci shows:

01:00.0 RAID bus controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.
MV64460/64461/64462 System Controller, Revision B (rev 01)



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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.

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On Tue, 01 May 2012 17:29:17 +0000, Ramon Hofer wrote:

> On Tue, 01 May 2012 16:16:07 +0000, Camaleón wrote:
>
>> What kind of hardware do you have (motherboard brand and model) and
>> what kind of hard disk controller do you need, what are your
>> expectations?
>>
>> SuperMicro boards (I'm also a SuperMicro user) are usually good enough
>> to use their embedded SAS/SATA ports, at least if you want to use a
>> software raid solution :-?
>
> I have a Supermicro C7P67 board. But there aren't any SAS connectors
> there.

Ah, okay. This one:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Core/P67/C7P67.cfm

The board has no SAS ports but it features 8 SATA ports (4 SATA2 and 4
SATA3), aren't those enough your your purpose? :-?

> This is a home media server. Earlier I used a debian box with a raid and
> a disk for mythtv recordings. But I ran out of space and resurrected an
> ReadyNas NV+. But this was so slow and I wanted to have everything
> centralized. So I was looking for something else and found this case:
>
> http://cybershop.ri-vier.nl/4u-rackmnt-server-case-w20-hotswap-satasas-drv-bays-rpc4220-p-18.html
>
> They also had that SAS controller and on the Supermicro website they
> wrote it would be SUSE and Red Hat compatible. So I thought it runs too
> under Debian.

Well, the driver status for most of the hardware out there can be
"misleading" many times. This is like a double-sided sword, you have
to carefully read the technical specs of the device to find out the
chipset it uses and then, search for its status in the kernel. If you
rely on hardware manufacturer's driver you are stuck: they can drop it
at any time or don't compile for your linux distribution version, which
seems to be this case :-(

> So performance isn't very important. But I don't know what exactly you
> mean by expectations.

Well, I wonder why is that you chose to go with SAS drives instead using
SATA given that the motehrboard only has SATA ports. When someone adds
a SAS controller is usually because he/she wnats to build a mainstream
server or expectes more performance/reliability than the average :-)

> The controller should give access to the disks.
> They will mostly be slow green drives. It's not even a very big problem
> if it's limited to 3 TB but of course it would be nice if I could also
> go bigger in some years when I run out of space again and want to add
> another raid.

Okay... I'll ask you again: why a SAS controller instead using the
embedded SATA ports?

> So the media server contains one analogue PCI tuner card (PVR-500) and
> one (maybe in future a second one will be added) TeVii (S480) sat tuner
> card.
>
> Now I have one 500 GB disk as system drive but I'm thinking of adding
> another one as RAID1.

This leads me to another question. Why RAID 1 for a media server?

> With the 20 hot swap slots in the case, the two system drives and an
> optical drive I need 23 sata connectors. Or better four SAS connectors
> and the eight SATA ports on the mainboard.
>
> I think software raid will cause me less cost and problem because when
> the controller fails I can replace it by anything that can talk SAS?

Okay, let's see what we have for now:

- A motherboard with 8 SATA ports
- A 4U case with up to 20 hot-swap drive bays for the disks (SATA/SAS)

I wonder why is that you have not considered using SATA hard disks :-)

>> Well, I'm not familiar with MD (I use hardware raid) but "md1 stopped"
>> and raid 5 with only 2 elements in the array does not sound very good
>> ;-(
>
> Ah, yes you're right :-o
>
> Was this during bootup? I recreated the array again after bootup...

It could be...

>> Ugh... and when is that happening, I mean, that "I/O error"? At install
>> time, when partitioning, after the first boot?
>
> This usually happens when I tried to create the filesystem on the raid
> array by
>
> sudo mkfs.ext4 -c -L test-device-1 /dev/md1
>
> And when I then want to see details about the array (sudo mdadm --detail
> / dev/md1) the system crashes and I get the I/O error.
>
> This causes so much problem that I wasn't able to repair it when it
> happened the first time (afterwards I had nothing to recover ;-) ).
>
> I posted it here:
>
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2012/04/msg01290.html

Too much hassle/problems for a simple raid5 volume :-(

>>> I've written a mail to Supermicro. Should I also create a Debian bug
>>> report?
>>
>> Yup, tough I think it will be forwarded upstream.
>
> Thanks I will run reportbug.
>
> But in the meantime I have installed the bpo kernel and it seems to be
> working now...
> At least it never run the disk check for so long, the raid is rebuilding
> and I can see the details as much as I want...

Glag it's more stable now with an updated kernel but I'd be keep monitoring
the array during some days... and if you experience another issue with the
disks, I would reconsider in replacing the hard disk controller or moving to
SATA disks, instead.

>> Mmm, then the above FTP link you sent was correct, weird...
>>
>> Well, that ZIP file is for updating the "firmware" of the card, not the
>> driver. You should not update it unless you are completely sure about
>> what you are doing, and even more when there's data on the array. Also,
>> ensure that's the correct firmware version for you card...
>
> You're about an hour too late :-o
> But I already had the newest firmware on the card.

Oh. Hope all went well O:-)

> But I'm confused about the two different versions too. lspci shows:

(I'm copying the rest of the message here)

> 01:00.0 RAID bus controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.
> MV64460/64461/64462 System Controller, Revision B (rev 01)

Well, lspci should display two different sets for the hard disk controller:
the SAS adapter (Marvell 88SE6480) and the motherboard embedded chipset
(Marvell 88SE9128) but none of these two matches with the lscpi output :-?

Greetings,

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On Wed, 02 May 2012 14:21:36 +0000, Camaleón wrote:

> On Tue, 01 May 2012 17:29:17 +0000, Ramon Hofer wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 01 May 2012 16:16:07 +0000, Camaleón wrote:
>>
>>> What kind of hardware do you have (motherboard brand and model) and
>>> what kind of hard disk controller do you need, what are your
>>> expectations?
>>>
>>> SuperMicro boards (I'm also a SuperMicro user) are usually good enough
>>> to use their embedded SAS/SATA ports, at least if you want to use a
>>> software raid solution :-?
>>
>> I have a Supermicro C7P67 board. But there aren't any SAS connectors
>> there.
>
> Ah, okay. This one:
>
> http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Core/P67/C7P67.cfm
>
> The board has no SAS ports but it features 8 SATA ports (4 SATA2 and 4
> SATA3), aren't those enough your your purpose? :-?

Yes, that's the mainboard I got.

The case has two places to add os drives, one for a cdrom and 20 hot
swapable disks.
It was available with either SAS or SATA connectors. But I would have
needed 23 SATA connectors on the mainboard or addon cards.
The case with 5 SAS connectors was available and the SATA one had much
later delivery date so I went for the SAS case.



>> This is a home media server. Earlier I used a debian box with a raid
>> and a disk for mythtv recordings. But I ran out of space and
>> resurrected an ReadyNas NV+. But this was so slow and I wanted to have
>> everything centralized. So I was looking for something else and found
>> this case:
>>
>> http://cybershop.ri-vier.nl/4u-rackmnt-server-case-w20-hotswap-satasas-
drv-bays-rpc4220-p-18.html
>>
>> They also had that SAS controller and on the Supermicro website they
>> wrote it would be SUSE and Red Hat compatible. So I thought it runs too
>> under Debian.
>
> Well, the driver status for most of the hardware out there can be
> "misleading" many times. This is like a double-sided sword, you have to
> carefully read the technical specs of the device to find out the chipset
> it uses and then, search for its status in the kernel. If you rely on
> hardware manufacturer's driver you are stuck: they can drop it at any
> time or don't compile for your linux distribution version, which seems
> to be this case :-(

Sounds very true :-(


>> So performance isn't very important. But I don't know what exactly you
>> mean by expectations.
>
> Well, I wonder why is that you chose to go with SAS drives instead using
> SATA given that the motehrboard only has SATA ports. When someone adds a
> SAS controller is usually because he/she wnats to build a mainstream
> server or expectes more performance/reliability than the average :-)

Since I couldn't find any mainboards with more than 20 SATA ports and
enough slots for addon cards (1x PCI, 2x PCI-Ex1 only for the tv cards).


>> The controller should give access to the disks. They will mostly be
>> slow green drives. It's not even a very big problem if it's limited to
>> 3 TB but of course it would be nice if I could also go bigger in some
>> years when I run out of space again and want to add another raid.
>
> Okay... I'll ask you again: why a SAS controller instead using the
> embedded SATA ports?

To be honest just because the case was ready at the dealer...


>> So the media server contains one analogue PCI tuner card (PVR-500) and
>> one (maybe in future a second one will be added) TeVii (S480) sat tuner
>> card.
>>
>> Now I have one 500 GB disk as system drive but I'm thinking of adding
>> another one as RAID1.
>
> This leads me to another question. Why RAID 1 for a media server?

Just because the case has two places for os disks. But on the other hand
it's seems to be interesting to set up a bootable raid1. And because it's
calming to have the safety of the raid as it serves all the media I have:
MythTV, LogitechMediaServer, etc. So my family relies on it and isn't
amused when the system is down ;-)


>> With the 20 hot swap slots in the case, the two system drives and an
>> optical drive I need 23 sata connectors. Or better four SAS connectors
>> and the eight SATA ports on the mainboard.
>>
>> I think software raid will cause me less cost and problem because when
>> the controller fails I can replace it by anything that can talk SAS?
>
> Okay, let's see what we have for now:
>
> - A motherboard with 8 SATA ports
> - A 4U case with up to 20 hot-swap drive bays for the disks (SATA/SAS)
>
> I wonder why is that you have not considered using SATA hard disks :-)

Besides the fact of the longer delivery because I couldn't find cheaper
solution than the two Supermicro SAS cards. The rest of the disks and
optical drive.



>>> Well, I'm not familiar with MD (I use hardware raid) but "md1 stopped"
>>> and raid 5 with only 2 elements in the array does not sound very good
>>> ;-(
>>
>> Ah, yes you're right :-o
>>
>> Was this during bootup? I recreated the array again after bootup...
>
> It could be...
>
>>> Ugh... and when is that happening, I mean, that "I/O error"? At
>>> install time, when partitioning, after the first boot?
>>
>> This usually happens when I tried to create the filesystem on the raid
>> array by
>>
>> sudo mkfs.ext4 -c -L test-device-1 /dev/md1
>>
>> And when I then want to see details about the array (sudo mdadm
>> --detail / dev/md1) the system crashes and I get the I/O error.
>>
>> This causes so much problem that I wasn't able to repair it when it
>> happened the first time (afterwards I had nothing to recover ;-) ).
>>
>> I posted it here:
>>
>> http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2012/04/msg01290.html
>
> Too much hassle/problems for a simple raid5 volume :-(

Yes, with my first system I had more luck to set it up: No problems iny
any way at all :-)


>>>> I've written a mail to Supermicro. Should I also create a Debian bug
>>>> report?
>>>
>>> Yup, tough I think it will be forwarded upstream.
>>
>> Thanks I will run reportbug.
>>
>> But in the meantime I have installed the bpo kernel and it seems to be
>> working now...
>> At least it never run the disk check for so long, the raid is
>> rebuilding and I can see the details as much as I want...
>
> Glag it's more stable now with an updated kernel but I'd be keep
> monitoring the array during some days... and if you experience another
> issue with the disks, I would reconsider in replacing the hard disk
> controller or moving to SATA disks, instead.

Thanks.
I think I'll go with the solution Stan posted (LSI 9240-4i and Intel SAS
expander).


>>> Mmm, then the above FTP link you sent was correct, weird...
>>>
>>> Well, that ZIP file is for updating the "firmware" of the card, not
>>> the driver. You should not update it unless you are completely sure
>>> about what you are doing, and even more when there's data on the
>>> array. Also, ensure that's the correct firmware version for you
>>> card...
>>
>> You're about an hour too late :-o
>> But I already had the newest firmware on the card.
>
> Oh. Hope all went well O:-)

Yes, I hope to be able to sell them to Windows users :-)


>> But I'm confused about the two different versions too. lspci shows:
>
> (I'm copying the rest of the message here)
>
>> 01:00.0 RAID bus controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.
>> MV64460/64461/64462 System Controller, Revision B (rev 01)
>
> Well, lspci should display two different sets for the hard disk
> controller: the SAS adapter (Marvell 88SE6480) and the motherboard
> embedded chipset (Marvell 88SE9128) but none of these two matches with
> the lscpi output :-?

You're right:
http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=JQtrS5J2

Why don't they match :-?


Best regards
Ramon


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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?


Best regards
Ramon


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On Wed, 02 May 2012 16:19:40 +0000, Ramon Hofer wrote:

> On Wed, 02 May 2012 14:21:36 +0000, Camaleón wrote:

>> Ah, okay. This one:
>>
>> http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Core/P67/C7P67.cfm
>>
>> The board has no SAS ports but it features 8 SATA ports (4 SATA2 and 4
>> SATA3), aren't those enough your your purpose? :-?
>
> Yes, that's the mainboard I got.
>
> The case has two places to add os drives, one for a cdrom and 20 hot
> swapable disks.
> It was available with either SAS or SATA connectors. But I would have
> needed 23 SATA connectors on the mainboard or addon cards. The case with
> 5 SAS connectors was available and the SATA one had much later delivery
> date so I went for the SAS case.

But you are still physically limited to the eight-ports provided by the
add-on card, right? :-?

>> Well, I wonder why is that you chose to go with SAS drives instead
>> using SATA given that the motehrboard only has SATA ports. When someone
>> adds a SAS controller is usually because he/she wnats to build a
>> mainstream server or expectes more performance/reliability than the
>> average :-)
>
> Since I couldn't find any mainboards with more than 20 SATA ports and
> enough slots for addon cards (1x PCI, 2x PCI-Ex1 only for the tv cards).

Okay, I didn't realize you were planning to use all of the available hard
disk trays of the case :-)

But then, you will need SAS controller with expansion capabilities, don't
you? I maybe overlooked but the SuperMicro SAS controller you first
pointed out does not seem to support more than 8 devices.

>>> Now I have one 500 GB disk as system drive but I'm thinking of adding
>>> another one as RAID1.
>>
>> This leads me to another question. Why RAID 1 for a media server?
>
> Just because the case has two places for os disks. But on the other hand
> it's seems to be interesting to set up a bootable raid1. And because
> it's calming to have the safety of the raid as it serves all the media I
> have: MythTV, LogitechMediaServer, etc. So my family relies on it and
> isn't amused when the system is down ;-)

Okay :-)

Just let me add a note of warning here: whatever SAS/SATA card you
finally choose, ensure that has support for big hard disks (>2-3TiB) just
in case, because this information is not usually displayed on the specs.

>> Okay, let's see what we have for now:
>>
>> - A motherboard with 8 SATA ports
>> - A 4U case with up to 20 hot-swap drive bays for the disks (SATA/SAS)
>>
>> I wonder why is that you have not considered using SATA hard disks :-)
>
> Besides the fact of the longer delivery because I couldn't find cheaper
> solution than the two Supermicro SAS cards. The rest of the disks and
> optical drive.

Ah, so your plan was adding two of this eight-port SAS addon card to get
a total of 16 hard disks.

>>> But in the meantime I have installed the bpo kernel and it seems to be
>>> working now...
>>> At least it never run the disk check for so long, the raid is
>>> rebuilding and I can see the details as much as I want...
>>
>> Glag it's more stable now with an updated kernel but I'd be keep
>> monitoring the array during some days... and if you experience another
>> issue with the disks, I would reconsider in replacing the hard disk
>> controller or moving to SATA disks, instead.
>
> Thanks.
> I think I'll go with the solution Stan posted (LSI 9240-4i and Intel SAS
> expander).

Mmm, yes. I can't tell for that specific model but LSI is a good
manufacturer for HBA solutions and also linux-friendly, at least that's
what I've heard :-)

>>> You're about an hour too late :-o
>>> But I already had the newest firmware on the card.
>>
>> Oh. Hope all went well O:-)
>
> Yes, I hope to be able to sell them to Windows users :-)

He, he.. good move :-)

>>> But I'm confused about the two different versions too. lspci shows:
>>
>> (I'm copying the rest of the message here)
>>
>>> 01:00.0 RAID bus controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.
>>> MV64460/64461/64462 System Controller, Revision B (rev 01)
>>
>> Well, lspci should display two different sets for the hard disk
>> controller: the SAS adapter (Marvell 88SE6480) and the motherboard
>> embedded chipset (Marvell 88SE9128) but none of these two matches with
>> the lscpi output :-?
>
> You're right:
> http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=JQtrS5J2
>
> Why don't they match :-?

Mmm, yes, there's something strange there. Ah, I think I got it :-)

> $ sudo lspci | grep Marvel
> 01:00.0 RAID bus controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MV64460/64461/64462 System Controller, Revision B (rev 01)

This can be the motherboard SATA 2 controller.

> 02:00.0 RAID bus controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MV64460/64461/64462 System Controller, Revision B (rev 01)

This can be the SAS add-on card.

> 03:00.0 SATA controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9123 PCIe SATA 6.0 Gb/s controller (rev 11)

This is the motherboard SATA 3 controller.

> 03:00.1 IDE interface: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Device 91a4 (rev 11)

And finally, this is the IDE/ATA port of the motherboard.

Does this make more sense? Yes, exact numbers do not match but this can be
due to a simple identification problem ("update-pciids" could solve this).

Greetings,

--
Camaleón


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On Wed, 02 May 2012 17:49:53 +0000, Camaleón wrote:

> On Wed, 02 May 2012 16:19:40 +0000, Ramon Hofer wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 02 May 2012 14:21:36 +0000, Camaleón wrote:
>
>>> Ah, okay. This one:
>>>
>>> http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Core/P67/C7P67.cfm
>>>
>>> The board has no SAS ports but it features 8 SATA ports (4 SATA2 and 4
>>> SATA3), aren't those enough your your purpose? :-?
>>
>> Yes, that's the mainboard I got.
>>
>> The case has two places to add os drives, one for a cdrom and 20 hot
>> swapable disks.
>> It was available with either SAS or SATA connectors. But I would have
>> needed 23 SATA connectors on the mainboard or addon cards. The case
>> with 5 SAS connectors was available and the SATA one had much later
>> delivery date so I went for the SAS case.
>
> But you are still physically limited to the eight-ports provided by the
> add-on card, right? :-?

Well, I have two cards and eight sata ports on the mainboard. With a
4xsata to sas cable I can connect another four hot swap drives and the os
drives plus cdrom.
Until now I have four 2 TB and four 1.5 TB disks. But I wanted to be able
to expand when I need more space.


>>> Well, I wonder why is that you chose to go with SAS drives instead
>>> using SATA given that the motehrboard only has SATA ports. When
>>> someone adds a SAS controller is usually because he/she wnats to build
>>> a mainstream server or expectes more performance/reliability than the
>>> average :-)
>>
>> Since I couldn't find any mainboards with more than 20 SATA ports and
>> enough slots for addon cards (1x PCI, 2x PCI-Ex1 only for the tv
>> cards).
>
> Okay, I didn't realize you were planning to use all of the available
> hard disk trays of the case :-)
>
> But then, you will need SAS controller with expansion capabilities,
> don't you? I maybe overlooked but the SuperMicro SAS controller you
> first pointed out does not seem to support more than 8 devices.

I have two of these cards. This makes 16 drives which can be attached to
the controllers.


>>>> Now I have one 500 GB disk as system drive but I'm thinking of adding
>>>> another one as RAID1.
>>>
>>> This leads me to another question. Why RAID 1 for a media server?
>>
>> Just because the case has two places for os disks. But on the other
>> hand it's seems to be interesting to set up a bootable raid1. And
>> because it's calming to have the safety of the raid as it serves all
>> the media I have: MythTV, LogitechMediaServer, etc. So my family relies
>> on it and isn't amused when the system is down ;-)
>
> Okay :-)
>
> Just let me add a note of warning here: whatever SAS/SATA card you
> finally choose, ensure that has support for big hard disks (>2-3TiB)
> just in case, because this information is not usually displayed on the
> specs.

Thanks for the warning. I will carefully check about the LSI 9240-4i and
the Intel 6Gb SAS expander.

I was just googling for the LSI SAS 9240-4i. It seems as it uses the same
chipset as the Intel expansion card (see post #5 in [1]).

They should be supported by the hwraid packages [2].

[1] http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1037845618
[2] http://hwraid.le-vert.net/wiki/DebianPackages

So I think this looks promising for the controller and expansion cards?


>>> Okay, let's see what we have for now:
>>>
>>> - A motherboard with 8 SATA ports
>>> - A 4U case with up to 20 hot-swap drive bays for the disks (SATA/SAS)
>>>
>>> I wonder why is that you have not considered using SATA hard disks :-)
>>
>> Besides the fact of the longer delivery because I couldn't find cheaper
>> solution than the two Supermicro SAS cards. The rest of the disks and
>> optical drive.
>
> Ah, so your plan was adding two of this eight-port SAS addon card to get
> a total of 16 hard disks.

Yes exactly :-)
But I should have searched infos more carefully :-?


>>>> But in the meantime I have installed the bpo kernel and it seems to
>>>> be working now...
>>>> At least it never run the disk check for so long, the raid is
>>>> rebuilding and I can see the details as much as I want...
>>>
>>> Glag it's more stable now with an updated kernel but I'd be keep
>>> monitoring the array during some days... and if you experience another
>>> issue with the disks, I would reconsider in replacing the hard disk
>>> controller or moving to SATA disks, instead.
>>
>> Thanks.
>> I think I'll go with the solution Stan posted (LSI 9240-4i and Intel
>> SAS expander).
>
> Mmm, yes. I can't tell for that specific model but LSI is a good
> manufacturer for HBA solutions and also linux-friendly, at least that's
> what I've heard :-)

Yes, I hope I won't have any problems with them. Especially because they
too promise SuSE and Red Hat support but only have a Debian 5 driver on
their homepage.

But since the hwraid page shows good support for MegaRAID cards I'm
optimistic :-)


>>>> But I'm confused about the two different versions too. lspci shows:
>>>
>>> (I'm copying the rest of the message here)
>>>
>>>> 01:00.0 RAID bus controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.
>>>> MV64460/64461/64462 System Controller, Revision B (rev 01)
>>>
>>> Well, lspci should display two different sets for the hard disk
>>> controller: the SAS adapter (Marvell 88SE6480) and the motherboard
>>> embedded chipset (Marvell 88SE9128) but none of these two matches with
>>> the lscpi output :-?
>>
>> You're right:
>> http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=JQtrS5J2
>>
>> Why don't they match :-?
>
> Mmm, yes, there's something strange there. Ah, I think I got it :-)
>
>> $ sudo lspci | grep Marvel
>> 01:00.0 RAID bus controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.
>> MV64460/64461/64462 System Controller, Revision B (rev 01)
>
> This can be the motherboard SATA 2 controller.
>
>> 02:00.0 RAID bus controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.
>> MV64460/64461/64462 System Controller, Revision B (rev 01)
>
> This can be the SAS add-on card.

I think they probably are the two SAS cards


>> 03:00.0 SATA controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9123 PCIe
>> SATA 6.0 Gb/s controller (rev 11)
>
> This is the motherboard SATA 3 controller.
>
>> 03:00.1 IDE interface: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Device 91a4 (rev
>> 11)
>
> And finally, this is the IDE/ATA port of the motherboard.

And these two are from the mainboard.


> Does this make more sense? Yes, exact numbers do not match but this can
> be due to a simple identification problem ("update-pciids" could solve
> this).

I did update-pciids but the numbers didn't change. But anyhow they are
the same as on the debian wiki pci database.
Or what numbers don't match?


Best regards
Ramon


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On Thu, 03 May 2012 13:48:33 +0000, Ramon Hofer wrote:

> On Wed, 02 May 2012 17:49:53 +0000, Camaleón wrote:

(removing some stuff)

>> Just let me add a note of warning here: whatever SAS/SATA card you
>> finally choose, ensure that has support for big hard disks (>2-3TiB)
>> just in case, because this information is not usually displayed on the
>> specs.
>
> Thanks for the warning. I will carefully check about the LSI 9240-4i and
> the Intel 6Gb SAS expander.
>
> I was just googling for the LSI SAS 9240-4i. It seems as it uses the
> same chipset as the Intel expansion card (see post #5 in [1]).
>
> They should be supported by the hwraid packages [2].
>
> [1] http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1037845618
> [2] http://hwraid.le-vert.net/wiki/DebianPackages
>
> So I think this looks promising for the controller and expansion cards?

The first time I had to buy a hardware raid controller I looked into
these two links which helped me a lot to "separate the sheep from the
goats":

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SATA_RAID_FAQ
http://wiki.debian.org/LinuxRaidForAdmins

(note that despite being scsi/sas/sata adapter controllers they all can
share the same set of drivers)

Altough the first link is not very up-to-date, it's still very helpful
when it comes to distinguish between the drivers/chipsets of the
controllers.

To keep yourself at the "safe-side", I would recommend sticking to the
set of drivers listed at the beginning of the page, that is:

***
Hardware RAID cards have drivers outside these two collections (e.g., 3w-
xxxx, 3w-9xxx, aacraid, cciss, dac960, dpt_i2o, gdth, ips, megaraid,
megaraid2, megaraid_mbox aka megaraid-newgen, mpt*).
***

These drivers are usually open source and so can be included in the
kernel so you don't even need to install nothing to get the card and the
array levels detected at install time.

In brief, yes, that card seems one of those you can consider to be "safe"
enough to don't have many problems :-P

>> Mmm, yes. I can't tell for that specific model but LSI is a good
>> manufacturer for HBA solutions and also linux-friendly, at least that's
>> what I've heard :-)
>
> Yes, I hope I won't have any problems with them. Especially because they
> too promise SuSE and Red Hat support but only have a Debian 5 driver on
> their homepage.
>
> But since the hwraid page shows good support for MegaRAID cards I'm
> optimistic :-)

At this point, let me share my own experience with hardware RAID cards
because "not all that glitters is gold" :-)

This is an own-made list I did of things one should take into account for
hardware RAID cards:

1/ The driver is included in the kernel (you will avoid many problems)

2/ The card's manufacturer provides a set of CLI tools (also GUI/web
based) to control all of the aspects of the RAID volume (from array
creation/modification/reconstruction/rebuilding/deletion/on-the-fly
volume expansion/current array status... up to firmware update, if
possible)

3/ The manufacturer is enough linux-friendly so that in the event of a
problem you can contact them with no regrets :-)

>> Mmm, yes, there's something strange there. Ah, I think I got it :-)
>>
>>> $ sudo lspci | grep Marvel
>>> 01:00.0 RAID bus controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.
>>> MV64460/64461/64462 System Controller, Revision B (rev 01)
>>
>> This can be the motherboard SATA 2 controller.
>>
>>> 02:00.0 RAID bus controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.
>>> MV64460/64461/64462 System Controller, Revision B (rev 01)
>>
>> This can be the SAS add-on card.
>
> I think they probably are the two SAS cards

I also thought so, but it cannot be that way :-)

(note the add-on card is SATA 2 -and thus 3 Gbps- while one of the
embedded ports is rated at 6 Gbps and there's only one port listed that
features the 6 Gbps speed)

>> Does this make more sense? Yes, exact numbers do not match but this can
>> be due to a simple identification problem ("update-pciids" could solve
>> this).
>
> I did update-pciids but the numbers didn't change. But anyhow they are
> the same as on the debian wiki pci database. Or what numbers don't
> match?

I wouldn't bother about that. Maybe is just the chipsets are still not
listed at the upstream PCI ID database.

Greetings,

--
Camaleón


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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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