I'm not sure if this is the same card I had a problem with when I put my own cheap a$$ file server together for home, but it sure sounds like it. (I swapped for PCI-E cards which had the same issue.) To cut a long and agonizing story short: The card's BIOS is determined that it's a RAID card, and, by golly, it's only going to present RAID drives, not JBODs. So the answer turned out to be configuring a RAID group of one disk (!) in the BIOS and using it as a JBOD under ZFS. Weird, but it's been stable for a while and even survived moving disks around between ports and cards, so the BIOS isn't trying to rebuild anything with only 1 disk. It was also quite happy to set up dual "1 disk RAID groups".
You'd assume that with no RAID groups defined that the JBODs would simply pass through, but apparently not. For two additional SATA ports for $30 I'll live with the weirdness, and the Solaris driver doesn't seem to care. James -----Original Message----- From: Peeyush Singh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2008 09:17 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [storage-discuss] SATA controller suggestion Hey guys, please excuse me in advance if I say or ask anything stupid :) Anyway, Solaris newbie here. I've built for myself a new file server to use at home, in which I'm planning on configuring SXCE-89 & ZFS. It's a Supermicro C2SBX motherboard with a Core2Duo & 4GB DDR3. I have 6x750GB SATA drives in it connected to the onboard ICH9-R controller (with BIOS RAID disabled & AHCI enabled). I also have a 160GB SATA drive connected to a PCI SIIG SC-SA0012-S1 controller, the drive which will be used as the system drive. My plan is to configure a RAID-Z2 pool on the 6x750 drives. The system drive is just there for Solaris. I'm also out of ports to use on the motherboard, hence why I'm using an add-in PCI SATA controller. My problem is that Solaris is not recognizing the system drive during the DVD install procedure. It sees the 6x750GB onboard drives fine. I originally used a RocketRAID 1720 SATA controller, which uses its own HighPoint chipset I believe, and it was a no-go. I went and exchanged that controller for a SIIG SC-SA0012-S1 controller, which I thought used a Silicon Integrated (SII) chipset. The install DVD isn't recognizing it unfortunatly, & now I'm not so sure that it uses a SII chipset. I checked the HCL, and it only lists a few cards that are reported to work under SXCE. If anyone has any suggestions on either... A) Using a different driver during the install procedure, or... B) A different, cheap SATA controller I'd appreciate it very much. Sorry for the rambling post, but I wanted to be detailed from the get-go. Thanks for any input! :) PS. On a side note, I'm interested in playing around with SXCE development. It looks interesting :) This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
