Why do they throw these fancy RAID-controllers at us when we have plenty CPU force to do zfs mirror and even raidz1 and raidz2?
I have 12 SATA disks and would like to prepare to add 12 new internal SATA disks to my home server. The cabinet (Lian Li Modular Cube http://www.microplex.no/aspx/produkt/prdinfovnet.aspx?plid=33415#) takes 24 3.5" or (insane 72 2.5") in front with suitable HDD frames/backplanes. I have used two Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 PCI-X true 8-port JBOD SATA HBA and I'm quite happy with them; They are cheap and works in plain PCI (limited by the PCI-speed aof course, but for my 12-disk home NAS it's good enough) The only problem is that no mainstream motherboards come with plenty PCI-X slots. My MB has none and PCI/PCI-X is not future proof. So adding a third AOC-SAT2-MV8 seems awkward So I'm looking for a PCIe HBA. The Adaptec 31605 or 52445 seems tempting as I could reuse the old AOC-SAT2-MV8 elsewhere. Or I could add an 8-port Adaptec 3805 or an LSI SAS3081E-R. What scares me off (aside the price for these) is that I've bumped into both Sun OEM Adaptec and HP OEM Megaraid at work and none of them would do true JBOD; No disks showed up in format. I had to configure 1-disk volumes in BIOS to simulate JBOD, and from what I understand this writes this config to disk destroying any existing data and partitioning, and what shoes up in format is *not* the disks (i.e. SEAGATE/IBM/whatever) but the logical volumes (i.e. Sun-STK RAID EXT or HP-LOGICAL VOLUME) On the other hand the Sun X4xxx series uses, AFAIK, some LSI chipset for the boot disks and they show the physical disks unless you deliberately configure a RAID0. Also Adaptec claims the 3- and 5-series can do JBOD, as do LSI for the Advanced Connectivity Line, though http://www.lsi.com/DistributionSystem/AssetDocument/LSI_HBA_v_Adaptec_WP_072108.pdf was more confusing than clarifying on to me on this. My almost absolute requirement is that 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. So could anyone confirm whether any of these adapters can operate in true JBOD-mode by my definition of JBOD; i.e. Just a Bunch Of Disks and not a Bunch of Volumes that looks like or simulates JBOD!? I would like to have a HBA that is just (like the AOC-SAT2-MV8): + Plug the pieces together + power on + devfsadm + zpool create (Though my brain-dead MSI BIOS thinks any added or replaced disk would be a better boot-candidate than the existing one :/ but I think that's a MB problem only..) Pål -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
