ServeRAID M5210e passthroughand syspd corruption

[Borja Marcos]

On Feb 28, 2014, at 11:17 AM, Steven Hartland wrote:

> mfi is a raid card it doesn't really have a true passthrough mfisyspd is
> the best you'll get. I'd recommend you switch to an HBA card which uses
> mps driver instead.

I know, unfortunately this brain dead (unless proven otherwise) IBM machine doesn't seem to allow me to use a proper HBA.

That said, since I asked for assistance in 2007 and Scott Long explained how to turn an aac card into a passthrough device
I have machines running like a charm. I am sure I can trust ZFS to detect any problems due to that setup.

> When you said you're seeing mfisyspd corruption what specifically are
> you seeing?

I described some of the problems several days ago, in short, either using ZFS or UFS on one of those "mfisyspd" devices or a "da" created by allowing
passthrough to work and running a benchmark, I get data corruption. No data corruption happens if I create a "raid 0" device on one disk. 
I've tried with Samsung and OCZ SSDs and, just wondering if it might be a SSD specific problem of some sort, a Seagate disk. No luck.

With so many manufacturers (even Sun!) tending including these controllers on their motherboards, and even refusing to sell alternative options (who wants a "software RAID" when you can get "a hardware one", they say) I think that it would be good to make sure that passthrough mode is supported in the best possible way.

Maybe we could lobby the LSI Overlords, the manufacturers, both, or just try to make the best possible use of the most commonly found hardware.





Borja.