SAS Drive Numbering inside the MPT driver

[Josef Grosch]

On Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 01:50:18PM +1000, Damian McGuckin wrote:
> 
> We have been fighting with a SAS drive controller under the control of the 
> MPT(4) driver. It is an LSI3041E-R, 4 drive controller, which is handled 
> by the MPT driver. Nice controller. Drive work nice and fast. But, as a 
> bootable controllers, its behaviour is almost unworkable.

[ DELETED ]

I really can't answer your question. We tired the LSI controller and had a
couple of problems. I think this was one of them. We have settled on the
Adaptec 3805 which is an 8 port controller. We are very happy with this
controller. It's fast, stable and well supported in FreeBSD. We tried the
3405, which is a 4 port controller, and found it was also very good. The
only thing to keep in mind that there is no support for the 3805/3405
before 6.3. 

One thing to watch for is to make sure the firmware is up to the latest
rev. (15343). We only use Seagate SAS drives. At some point recently
Seagate changed the way the drive reports disk geometry. If the controller
has disks attached that are a different rev and report the geometry
differently then the firmware freaks out. You will get long stalls (20
seconds or more), failures building RAID 1, 5, and 10, etc. All this got
fixed in the firmware rev. 15343.

Hope this helps



Josef

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Josef Grosch        | from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic 
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