Hi all,
During last week, I've done some systematic hardware tests to determine which
recent RAID cards work fine with DragonFly.
I've bought an Areca ARC-1880-i adapter and thanks to a local
server-class hardware distributor, I've been able to test a grand total
of 11 different SAS or SATA RAID adapters.
The tests were done with a DragonFly 2.9/x86_64 snapshot from 2011-04-19.
Besides the various RAID adapters, the following hardware was used:
- 1x Supermicro X7SPA-H mainboard with Atom D510 CPU
- 1x 2GB DDR2 667 SODIMM
- 2x Samsung SATA 3Gb/s 160GB hard drives
- 1x SATA DVD-ROM Drive plugged on one of the motherboard's SATA ports
For the tests, all RAID volumes were configured as a mirror with the two
Samsung disks (RAID 1)
List of RAID adapters:
- Areca ARC-1200 (SATA only)
- Areca ARC-1210 (SATA only)
- Areca ARC-1222
- Areca ARC-1680-ix
- Areca ARC-1880-i
- LSI MegaRAID SAS 8204ELP
- LSI SAS 3081E-R
- LSI SAS 9211-8i
- 3Ware 9690SA-4i
- Adaptec AAR-1120SA
- Adaptec 3405
Areca ARC-1200
--
http://www.areca.com.tw/products/pciex1_2p_internal.htm
This is a SATA card only
The card was immediately recognized by the DragonFly snapshot. There were no
problems to install the system and to run the new installation from the RAID
volume.
dmesg extract:
arcmsr0: Areca SATA Host Adapter RAID controller
Areca ARC-1210
--
http://www.areca.com.tw/products/pcie.htm
This is a SATA card only
This card was quite similar to the ARC-1200; as before, all went well.
Areca ARC-1222
--
http://www.areca.com.tw/products/pcietosas01.htm
The adapter was recognized out of the box:
arcmsr0: Areca SAS 3G Host Adapter RAID contreoller (RAID6 capable) mem ...
irq16 at device 0.0
ARECA RAID ADAPTER0: Driver Version 1.20.00.19 2010-11-11
ARECA RAID ADAPTER0: FIRMWARE version v1.48 2010-07-08
A RAID volume not beeing fully initialized is not detected.
Once the initialization is complete or if background initialization is
selected in the adapter BIOS setup, the volume is correctly recognized:
da0 at arcmsr0 bus0 target0 lun0
da0: Areca ARC-1212-VOL#000 R001 Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
da0: Serial Number 41811d2909406830
da0: 166.666MB/s transfers (83.333 MHz, offset 32, 16bit)
da0: Command queuing Enabled
da0: 152587MB (312499200 512 byte sectors: 255H 63 S/t 19452C)
A linear read of the first 1.25 GB of the drive gave a speed of 127.24 MB/s,
twice that of the previous models, which lead me to believe the reading was
parallelized on both drives.
Areca ARC-1680-ix
http://www.areca.com.tw/products/pcietosas1680series.htm
As before, all went well.
The adapter recognized the volume created on the ARC-1222 and could boot
from it.
Areca ARC-1880-i
http://www.areca.com.tw/products/1880.htm
A complete installation and boot from the new system went fine.
dmesg extract:
arcmsr0: Areca SAS 6G Host Adapter RAID Controller (RAID6 capable) port
0xc800-0xc8ff mem 0xfe94-0xfe97,0xfe93-0xfe93 irq 11 at device
0.0 on pci1
ARECA RAID ADAPTER0: Driver Version 1.20.00.19 2010-11-11
ARECA RAID ADAPTER0: FIRMWARE VERSION V1.49 2010-12-10
da0 at arcmsr0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: Areca ARC-1880-VOL#000 R001 Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
da0: Serial Number 4187860270766765
da0: 166.666MB/s transfers (83.333MHz, offset 32, 16bit)
da0: Command Queueing Enabled
da0: 152587MB (312499200 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 19452C)
LSI MegaRAID SAS 8204ELP
http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/internal_raid/megaraid_sas/megaraid_sas_8204elp/
Even though a RAID volume had been created in the BIOS of the card, it was
not visible from DragonFly
The individual disks were visible as da0 and da1.
LSI SAS 3081E-R
---
http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/host_bus_adapters/sas_hbas/lsisas3081er/
The RAID1 volume created in the BIOS of the card was visible but there were
some timeout error messages from the start:
dmesg extract:
mpt0: LSI Logic SAS/SATA Adapter
mpt0: MPI Version = 1.5.20.0
mpt0: Capabilities: (RAID-0 RAID-1E RAID-1)
mpt0: 1 Active Volume (2 Max)
mpt0: 2 Hidden Drive Members (14 Max)
...
mpt0: mpt_wait_req(4) timed out
mpt0: read_cfg_header timed out
mpt0: vol0(mpt0:0:0) mpt_refresh_raid_vol: Failed to read RAID vol Hdr(0)
mpt0: vol0(mpt0:0:0): Settings()
mpt0: vol0(mpt0:0:0): 0 Members:
mpt0: vol0(mpt0:0:0): RAID0-Optimal
(mpt0:0:1): Physical(mpt0:0:1:0),Pass-thru (mpt0:1:0:0)
(mpt0:0:1): Online
(mpt0:0:2): Physical(mpt0:0:2:0),Pass-thru (mpt0:1:1:0)
(mpt0:0:2): Online
...
da0 at mpt0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: LSILOGIC Logical Volume 3000 Fixed DirectAccess SCSI-2 device
da0: 300.000MB/s transfers
da0: 151634MB (310546432 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 19330C)
I couldn't install DragonFly, newfs_hammer hung at 90% completion. The disks
were making strange noises, as if they were