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

[Borja Marcos]

On Jan 26, 2011, at 3:12 PM, Josh Paetzel wrote:

> On Friday, January 14, 2011 08:03:01 am Peter Lai wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 6:44 AM, Borja Marcos <borjam at sarenet.es> wrote:
>>> On Jan 14, 2011, at 12:50 PM, Peter Lai wrote:
>>>> 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/topi
>>>> cs/en/us/raid_controller?c=us&l=en&cs=555 suggests the H200 has jbod
>>>> mode...
>>> 
>>> 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 :(
> 
> The H200 is a 6 gbps LSI SAS HBA under the hood that is not supported by mpt.  
> There is a new driver in HEAD called mps that supports the card.  People have 
> had varying amounts of success running the driver ported to 8.x.  I can 
> provide you with a .ko that works on 8.x, but it comes with a YMMV warranty.
> 
> FWIW, this driver won't be appearing in 8.2 due to various concerns the people 
> working on it had with it.


Thanks :)

I've been using it (moving it from 9-CURRENT to 8-STABLE is very easy) and except for a couple of problems (see my posting in this same list) it's working great.

I really look forward to see a production ready version. I'm really annoyed by the über crappy "mfi¨ cards.






Borja.