ZFS and "internal" mfi RAID cards, the eternal question

[Peter Lai]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 6:44 AM, Borja Marcos <borjam at sarenet.es> wrote:
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> On Jan 14, 2011, at 12:50 PM, Peter Lai wrote:
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>> Is there a reason you are ordering your Dells with H700 instead of
>> H200; do you really want the battery backed cache anyway?
>> http://www.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/global/products/pvaul/topics/en/us/raid_controller?c=us&l=en&cs=555
>> suggests the H200 has jbod mode...
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> Indeed, it doesn't work under FreeBSD. Or am I wrong?
>

Good point. My guess here is that as an LSI card, it's not really
supposed be picked up by mfi, but mpt. But most of my experience with
dell has been to not even bother with the addon raid and just stick
with the mpt controllers.  Of course, they only support up to 8 disks,
so if you need more than that...well :(

>> FWIW, in our case, we didn't need 16 ports and were ok with 3gb
>> channels so we actually just settled with the dumb mpt controller.
>>> Maybe there would be a way to just tell the card firmware to shut up and let it work like a simple  and well behaved SAS card?
>>
>> One could wish :)
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> Well, the ugly patch to mfi_cam lets me access the disks. Of course it doesn't seen to be a clean solution.
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> Borja.
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