Dell SAS6IR is it worth the effort to convert to IT

[Lee Brown]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2018 at 9:03 AM, Josh Paetzel <josh at tcbug.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Sep 13, 2018, at 10:58 AM, Lee Brown wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm in the process of setting up an old PowerEdge R410 which has, I
> > believe, the LSI Logic AS1068, using the mpt driver.
> >
> > I'm not interested in running it as a hardware RAID but rather a
> > geli(authentication only)+gmirror+gjournal.
> >
> > It seems like flashing it requires booting into dos, which frankly I
> can't
> > be bothered with.  mptutil doesn't appear to have that capability.
> >
> > Are there any major downsides to running it in IR mode as two disks?
> > There's no option to turn off the write-cache, but being battery backed
> the
> > only danger I see with that is if the machine is powered with pending
> > writes on the card and the battery gives out before power is restored.
> >
> > The use case is routing/snort IPS with minimal logging, so disk
> performance
> > isn't critical.  It will be the redundant router so mostly doing nothing
> > except the little work OSPF needs.
> >
> > Thanks in advance for any comments -- lee
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>
> On those controllers IR mode is just IT mode with the ability to create
> RAID.  If you don't create a RAID array it behaves exactly like an IT
> controller.
>
> And yes, FreeBSD mptutil doesn't have the ability to erase the flash,
> which you need to be able to do to go from IR to IT.  DOS is the typical
> answer for that.
>
Thanks a lot Josh, most appreciated.