Dell Perc 6ir slow to initialize zfs pool

[apollo567]

I found a cheap h310 on ebay, ordered it.

May I ask how much you spent on it ?

[RAJOD]

I fooled around with it some more. Tried to set up a "Software Raid"

Did not get any errors and it looks like I have a sofware raid but I might be missing a step. I still see "No Disk Configured" under the system view.



Apollo, the Raid card was $60.00 USA.

[RAJOD]

The H310 says it can handle 32 drives, so I assume that would be 16 per port. In Raid 1 it says 2 drives per volume. Does this mean I could hook 16 drives (8 pairs in raid 1) on one single port? And another 16 drives (8 pairs) on the other port?
I've looked at the sas cables and they only break out to 2 drives from a single port, have not seen a single port break out to 16 SAS or SATA ports.

So how would anyone hook that many drives up with only two ports?

Dell Perc H310 specs

Product Name - Perc H310 Integrated Controller
Product Type - SATA/SAS Controller
RAID Supported - Yes
Form Factor - Plug-in Card
RAID Levels - 0, 1, 5, 10, 50
Host Bus Type - 8 Lane, PCI Express 2.0 compliant
Data transfer rates - Up to 6Gb/s per port
SAS Controller - LSISAS2008
Connectors - Two x4 internal mini-SAS SFF8087
Max # of devices - Non-RAID: 32, RAID 0: 16 per volume, RAID 1: 2 per volume plus hot spare, RAID 5: 16 per volume, RAID 10: 16 per volume, RAID 50: 16 per volume.

[b0ssman]

you need port expander backplanes to use more than the original 8 drives.

a lsi 2008 can support 256 drives that way.

[RAJOD]

you need port expander backplanes to use more than the original 8 drives.
.

When you say original 8 drives, do you mean using two cables, each breaking out into 4 SATA/SAS connectors?

Why can't they make a sas/sata cable that breaks out into 8 or even 16 connectors? Is it just because its gets too messy with all the wires or is there some other obstacle preventing it.

I found a cable that breaks out into 4 for my perc 6i but not found a mini sas that breaks out into 4 drives for the h310.

Just saw this one on new egg. Would this work with the h310?
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002MK7F0Y/?ta ... verfl08-20
or
http://www.amazon.com/Dshot%C2%AE-Inter ... t+Cable%2C

[b0ssman]

because the mini sas connector is just a 4 device connector. just more compact.

see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_attached_SCSI

[RAJOD]

Thanks good read on the SAS vs SATA, Other than price, SAS appears superior in speed and reliability. Does using NAS4Free zfs still allow for full functionality of SAS ie. Full speed bidirectional data transfer?

[apollo567]

Think the bottleneck are the disks itself, not the interface......

[RAJOD]

Well I got that perc h310 today.

Fired it up pressed control-r on boot and it sees 2 drives -GOOD

But they are both listed as STATE-BLOCKED.

Is this some dell trick where if the drive is not Dell certified they block them? I thought that was only on the newer Perc controllers.

[RAJOD]

I followed this guide to flash the h310. Had to do it on old dell as get an error on the lenovo server.

http://www.vladan.fr/flash-dell-perc-h3 ... -firmware/

Then I booted into version 10.x of nas4free and setup pool and failed to initialize.

root: zpool create -m /mnt/SASpool SASpool mirror /dev/da0 /dev/da1
Sep 3 21:39:49 nas4free root: cannot create 'SASpool': invalid argument for this pool operation

Now I have another useless raid card, Wonder what the deal is with these drives?

[RAJOD]

Well its up and running.
The fix was to pull the raid card and the two SAS drives and stick in two 2TB SATA WD reds. Up and running in minutes. No issues.

I don't know if anyone has used SAS drives on a NAS. They might use raid controllers but most of the threads are using SATA drives not SAS.

I'll stick them in a workstation using hardware raid. I don't think nas4free + SAS work.

[apollo567]

Now I have another useless raid card, Wonder what the deal is with these drives?

ebay is your friend for the unused stuff !!

[apollo567]

Now I have another useless raid card, Wonder what the deal is with these drives?

ebay is your friend for the unused stuff !!
I don't know anyone yet who tried it with SAS drives.
Nas4Free is based on FreeBSD 10, think in this respect it would make sense to check FreeBSD 10 Forums. I can't believe there is a principal problem there. From this point we can perhaps check if there are some libs missing

[b0ssman]

have you contacted the seagate support on how to change the blocksize like i suggested?

[daoyama]

If you need used SAS drive, you might need format (not logical format) the SAS drive with 512 byte/block.
SAS drive use 512, 520 and 528 byte/block.
If your card support 512 byte/block format, try it first.
I don't know how to format on FreeBSD. Please google it.

Note that ZFS requires 512 or 4K (a power of 2) byte/block.

[RAJOD]

The only card that I was able to format the drives with was the HP212. I did format them both to 512 blocks. It tooks like 3+ hours per drive.

Still no go on the drives. I even bought a used perc h310 controller. Dells uses the perc h310 for these same seagate dell drives. My drives are just OEM seagate constilations not DELL approved.

On the H310 the drives came up as "Blocked" on the controller state. I can only assume they were blocked because they did not have dell firmware in the drives.

Next I flashed the h310 to LSI2008 IT firmware. Now the drives do come up as individual drives. But I do not have a sas address. I get a Sas address not configured on boot up.

When I run the megaraid commands to add a sas address I get this goofy dos error. Says something like "

dos4gw.exe error initilizing mouse"

I have no idea why a mouse init error is showing up or what it has to do with adding back the SAS address to the card.

So I feel I am close to getting it working but ran into this error trying to add the SAS addresss back to the card.

[apollo567]

would it perhaps be an Idea to flash the H310 with an LSI 9240 -8i Firmware ?
Then there can't be a 'dell blockade' . For sata drives there is nothing like this...

[b0ssman]

are you sure you low level formated the drives and not create a jbod array with a block size of 512 ?
a good test would be to boot a linux distribution because i think they can handle different block size and look at the dmesg output.

it it mode the megaraid commands wont work, because the card is not a megaraid card anymore.

the lsi command to add a sas address is
sas2flsh -o -sasadd 500605b0XXXXXXXX
replace the xxx with the value written (hopefully) on the card.

a boot disk with the utils can be found here
http://lime-technology.com/forum/index. ... ic=12767.0

[RAJOD]

I low level formatted the drives from the HP212 controller one at a time. Did not create an array.
Did both the LSI and megaraid commads to add the sas address back. Got goofy mouse error both times. Tried it from DOS7 and freedos same result.

[RAJOD]

have you contacted the seagate support on how to change the blocksize like i suggested?

Yes but no reply from seagate. At least not yet. But I did format them to the correct size. And I have a h310 controller which is what dell uses on those same constellation drives. They just have a dell bios in the drives.

[RAJOD]

have you contacted the seagate support on how to change the blocksize like i suggested?

Yes but no reply from seagate. At least not yet. But I did format them to the correct size. And I have a h310 controller which is what dell uses on those same constellation drives. They just have a dell bios in the drives.