Understanding Controllers

[Bikerznet]

Hi

I have system which consists of the following:

Asus P8 H67-M EVO motherboard

Intel i7-2600K processor

8MB ram

5x 2TB hard-drives

I run the NAS to serve blu-ray and DVD iso files to my Media players, which are situated in various locations around my home. With my system currently setup in ZFS raidz.

Currently all my gear is in an old pc case and I am looking to upgrade to a X-Case RM420 4u Rackmount V2- 20, which is available here in the UK, this will give me 20 Hot-Swap drive bays for future proofing of my system.

I am looking to add another 5 2TB drives in the near future and hope to migrate all my drives over to a raid-z2 setup.

Now my question!

What is the difference between all the different types of controller cards, such as sata controller cards, sas expansion cards etc... I don't need raid as I will be using ZFS. I have seen the various SATA controller cards and 2x 8 port cards would give me the required (including motherboard ports) 20 ports for my case, but these seem difficult to get here in the UK and many are only 3 Gb/s and not 6 Gb/s. The expander cards seem to have greater capacity per card but i have little understanding of there use. The case I will be using uses SFF-8087 Mini sas connectors and while I know you can get breakout leads to convert the other end to SATA a controller card with these type on connector would be great.

I want to know which cards are supported to make installation easier.

Any help, ideas or recommendations will be gratefully accepted.

[Bikerznet]

Just being looking at various website to get a general feel for this subject..looks like a back to university moment, boy thing sure have moved on since the 1990's!!!

But getting to grips with it I think..firstly look for a sas HBA (host Bus Adapter) 4-port,as I said a HBA is better as I don't want raid Then get a sas expander card to expand to extend the port available to me, this look great as it also allows further jbod boxes to be added at a later date to increase the server array size, look a great way to future proof a server!

Now just need to find the hardware that is Nas4free compatible and at the right price!!

Anyone had experience of this type of setup?

[lindsay]

Not have any experiance with SAS controllers, but SATA controllers and they just work as expected for me

[Haplo]

I use the IBM Servraid M1015, not that bad price and I've flashed it just to be a HBA without RAID functionality, it's a 6Gbps SAS HBA.
So far it has been working great, I get 100+ MByte/s when copying files to it which is more or less the limit of the 1Gbps network.
4x 3TB WD Red drives in a raidz.

[danic]

Although I have not purchased one, I bet SAS expanders will be more expensive than multiple SAS HBA's. I see SAS expanders are used more for external storage or more storage in additional enclosures. A very common card around here to get the job done is IBM Servraid M1015. I would recommend a pair of those or equivalent hardware (2x LSI SAS 9211-8i's for 2x8 ports or 1x LSI SAS 9201-16i for 16 ports). This would supply 16 ports + 6 motherboard ports would yield >20 drive capacity. Also with SAS cards you can use the smaller SFF-8087 cables to connect to your back-planes instead sas to sata breakout cables. Also depending on what you are going to do with your NAS4free, SATA 3GB should be fast enough for traditional disks. You probably already know this but SAS hardware/controllers works fine with SATA disks, but SAS disks do not work SATA controllers.
If you need to know if a specific HBA will work with nas4free check out FreeBSD 9's Hardware list.

[Bikerznet]

I like the look of the LSI SAS 9201-16i or the highpoint 2740, I need a 16 port card not 2 8 port cards as I only have a PCIe x16 port available (no x8 on my motherboard) and both available in UK for around £300, the highpoint is supported under FreeBDS 9.1.

Think I'll make a choice between either of those.

[b0ssman]

go for the lsi.

its better supported if you decide to go with virtualization later on.

hoewever your P8 H67-M EVO has 1 x16 and 1 x4 pcie slot.

the m1015 will work fine in the x4 2.0 slot. that slot can do about 2000mbyte/sec.

[Bikerznet]

m1015 this states it's interface is PCIe 2.0 x8 ?

[b0ssman]

yes but the pcie standard allows to use cards in slots with less lanes.

see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Expres ... tandard.29

[Haplo]

However, it may be physically impossible to put a x8 card in a x4 slot.

[b0ssman]

the board has 2 physical x16 slots

[danic]

If the original poster is interested, seems like forum member is selling some decent sas controllers. SATA 3Gb/s - LSI SAS 3081-E-R's viewtopic.php?f=50&t=2653. Looks like LSI has downloadable IT firmware (Non-raid version of the card) which is optimal for ZFS.

[Bikerznet]

Update I will be using a differnt motherbord now, with upto 3 PCIe slots that will run X8cards, so now not an issue:)

I will be using a Cooler Master HAF X case with 2 hot-swap caddies that convert 5.25 bays into 5 hots-wap bays, so 2 of them in the front of the case will give me 10 drives and it also has a 5 drive bay cage inside and with a bit of case modding I think I can get another 5 bay cage inside, to give me 20 drives.The reason for this case is I already own it, so a no cost option:)

So 2 x 8 port card will be good for this case, now Looking at the price the LSI is over £200 here in the UK so not an option, the IBM is £160, but I can get the High Point RocketRaid2720SGL for £ 139. Now why are people saying don't use the high Point? It is compatible with FreeBDS 9.1 and the drivers available from there website. But another question all these cards are Raid cards are there no Non-Raid HBA available? I will be using ZFS so don't need raid, highpoint do a non-raid version of there card called the Rocket 2750, but cannot see if it is FreeBDS compatible anywhere.

[danic]

I've had few highpoint controllers (2640, 2300) in the past and disliked every single one in FreeBSD/Linux environment.
Problem 1, Driver support is about 2-3 years behind. For example it seems they only have FreeBSD 8 support for RocketRaid 2720. Nas4Free is FreeBSD 9.
Problem 2, IMO adding drivers to nas4free is do-able but not simple.
Problem 3, not an issue for you, but there management software was so bad I could not manage 2640 and 2300 at the same time. Highpoint support was unable to help me.
Problem 4, ZFS support. These highpoint controller are meant for RAID. At the time I was using them they had no non-raid BIOS's. When I had a Highpoint 2640 controller I could not configure it stay 'legacy' mode (their legacy mode = pass-through the drive to the OS without any raid configuration, which ZFS should have). I eventually had to configure every disk as a single 'jbod' array.
Problem 5, Although it was my fault, I had write cache on, system halted during a writing data, had to force a hard reset, and poof! corrupt zfs pools. (<<<< oh my that was horror story... I recovered but after 1.5 months of learning ins and outs of zfs)

So my recommendation is stay away from Highpoint for unix environments.
Good Luck

PS: I couldn't find Rocket 2750 on highpoint's website

[apollo567]

I can recommend LSI Controller (and the OEM Versions thereof), they work well and Reliable in the FreeBSD Environment

[b0ssman]

So 2 x 8 port card will be good for this case, now Looking at the price the LSI is over £200 here in the UK so not an option, the IBM is £160, but I can get the High Point RocketRaid2720SGL for £ 139.

best place to look for an m1015 is ebay

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/IBM-ServerRAI ... 2ec76e8362

[Bikerznet]

Thanks bOssman ..only buy products from UK suppliers, so that ebay a no-go for me.

[b0ssman]

http://skinflint.co.uk/ibm-serveraid-m1 ... 15389.html

still better than 160.

i actually bought mine from amazon.de but it was shipped from the uk for 87 Euro (not available anymore)

http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B005MQQ ... UTF8&psc=1