Do you recommend Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 as PCI-X SATA controller?

[Moritz Wilhelmy]

Hello Stephane,

Thanks for the informative reply!

On Thu, Apr 05, 2012 at 01:18:11 +0900, Stephane LAPIE wrote:
> Right now I'm using this controller :
> 
> mpt0 at pci0:6:1:0:    class=0x010000 card=0x10aa1734 chip=0x00541000
> rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
>     vendor     = 'LSI Logic / Symbios Logic'
>     device     = 'SAS1068 PCI-X Fusion-MPT SAS'
>     class      = mass storage
>     subclass   = SCSI
> mpt1 at pci0:6:7:0:    class=0x010000 card=0x10aa1734 chip=0x00541000
> rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
>     vendor     = 'LSI Logic / Symbios Logic'
>     device     = 'SAS1068 PCI-X Fusion-MPT SAS'
>     class      = mass storage
>     subclass   = SCSI
> 
> http://www.lsi.com/products/storagecomponents/Pages/LSISAS1068.aspx
> 
> The only problem is, that card is an OEM version that was a bit tricky
> to find.
> I got it off an auction site in Japan, but I guess it covers pretty much
> what you want,
> in that it will advertise disks as physical volumes by default.

I see. I'll try to get my hands on one, but anything that's hard to buy
is also not an option (as always with universities, there is already
enough bureaucracy involved). Unfortunately, this limits the choice of
hardware :-(

> My only complaint on FreeBSD 9.X so far is that,
>  it has trouble doing SMART probes on the disks using passthrough :)

Uh, that's bad with that many disks... How do you work around it, if at
all?

> Performance is top notch, even though I had to tweak my /boot/loader.conf
> to have a long SCSI timeout for disk detection (as you can imagine,
> 15 disks will take a LONG time to detect.) :
> kern.cam.scsi_delay=15000

How's the performance of the AOC-SAT2-MV8 compared to this one?

> Otherwise you could pretty much shoot for this one if PCI-X is not a
> requirement :
> 
> mfi0 at pci0:2:0:0:    class=0x010400 card=0x92401000 chip=0x00731000
> rev=0x02 hdr=0x00
>     vendor     = 'LSI Logic (Was: Symbios Logic, NCR)'
>     class      = mass storage
>     subclass   = RAID
> 
> The only real beef with this one is driver support,
> as I had to make it work by using LSI's driver,
> (which will require some simple patching if you plan on using it on 9.X)
> and it won't handle more than one card at once as it stands.
> I'm not quite aware of support status for this baby in 9.0 or 10.0.

Unfortunately, the mainboard doesn't have any PCIe slots, because then I
assume I would have a lot more cards to choose from...


Best regards,

    Moritz