Hi, I'm trying to find out which controller card people here recommend that can drive 8 SATA hard drives and that would work with my Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe motherboard, which has following expansion slots: 2 x PCI Express x16 slot at x16, x8 speed (PCIe)
The main requirements I have are: - drive 8 SATA drives - rock solid reliability with x86 OpenSolaris 2009.06 or SXCE - easy to identify failed drives and replace them (hot swap is not necessary but a bonus if supported) - I must be able to move disks with data from one controller to another of different brands (and back!), only doing zpool export and import, which implies the HBA must be able to run in JBOD-mode without storing or modify anything on the disks. And preferably, the drives must show up with the format command. - should support staggered spinup of drives preferably >From limited research I can see that at least the following 3 main >possibilities exist: 1. Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 (PCI-X interface) (pure SATA) (~$100) 2. Supermicro AOC-USAS-L8i / AOC-USASLP-L8i (PCIe interface) (miniSAS to SATA cables) (~$100) 3. LSI SAS 3081E-R or other LSI 'MegaRAID' cards (PCIe interface) (miniSAS to SATA cables) (~$200+) 1. AOC-SAT2-MV8 : Again, from reading a bit, I can see that although the M2N-SLI Deluxe motherboard does not have a PCI-X slot, apparently it could take the AOC-SAT2-MV8 card in one of the PCIe slots, although the card would only run in 32-bit mode, instead of 64-bit mode, and would therefore run slower. 2. AOC-USAS-L8i : The AOC-USAS-L8i card looks possible too, again running in the PCIe slot, but the old threads I saw on this seem to talk about some device numbering issue which could make determining the right failed drive to pull out, a difficult task -- see here for more details: http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=271751 http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=46982&tstart=90 3. LSI SAS 3081E-R or other LSI 'MegaRAID' cards : http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/host_bus_adapters/sas_hbas/lsisas3081er/index.html?remote=1&locale http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118100 This forum thread from DEC 2007 doesn't sound too good regarding drive numbering (for identifying failed drives etc), but the thread is 18 months old, and perhaps the issues may have been resolved now? Also I noticed an extra '-R' in the model number I found, but this might be an omission of the original forum poster -- see here: http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=46982&tstart=90 I saw Ben Rockwood saying good things about the LSI MegaRAID cards, although the model he references supports only 4 internal and 4 external drives so is not what I want -- see here: http://opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?messageID=368445#368445 Perhaps there are better LSI MegaRAID cards that people know of and can recommend? Preferably not too expensive though, as it's for a home system :) If anyone can throw some light on these topics, I would be pleased to hear from you. Thanks a lot. Simon http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/ -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
