MFI and passthrough

[Borja Marcos]

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On Nov 6, 2007, at 4:02 PM, Scott Long wrote:

> Doug Ambrisko wrote:
>> BTW, it works great in this mode if you know what you are doing :-)
>
> Can you explain what that means?  I recommend against it because it's
> not a well-tested configuration either in FreeBSD or in Dell.  It's  
> not
> clear, at least to me, how basic things like i/o errors get  
> handled; does SCSI sense data get consumed by the controller  
> firmware, or is it
> passed through to the OS without problem?

Aha, I see. I assumed that the controller would pass the sense data,  
etc, without problems.

>> | I do believe that Dell does sell a direct attached disk option for
>> | the 2950/1950 called the PERC5/e.  It's essentially an LSI MPT-SAS
>> | controller that directly replaces the PERC5/i card that you have  
>> now.
>> | It should be able to control all 6 disk slots, and can do both SAS
>> | and SATA.
>> I've been told the PERC5/e and PERC5/i are the same except for PCI
>> sub-device ID and are both the mfi(4) RAID controllers.  They do
>> have a mpt(4) based card but it only supports 4 bays.  I'm not sure
>> what it's real name is but we have some lying around for random
>> testing.  I don't leave them in machines.
>
> We should get a definitive answer on this.

We asked our Dell salesman and he confirmed that there's a non disk  
array card for this machine,
but it only supports 4 disks, not 6.





Borja

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