Can you get S.M.A.R.T info ?

[Black Ninja]

These pair of Crucial M4, what is their capacity ?

Here is the good news about LSI 9271. You may not have to get a BBU if you don't use "write back" mode which uses the card cache. The card comes with "Fastpath" license which is something very cool when you use it with SSDs.

With 2 words: If you are going to be using only SSD drives with the raid card, don't buy BBU right away like I did cause you may not end up need it. Get just the card and try the fastpath , then if you still think you need it you can get it. I paid $150 for BBU which is actually supercapasitor called by lsi "cachevault" , but I don't use the cache so I don't need to protect it with battery.


P.S. It's not just the battery that cost money. Look this.
This is supercap and the this little board. With BBU is similar but the board is on the back of the battery. So the BBU is : Battery, the board and a cable.

 

[joeschmuck]

So FastPath is just a cache it looks like and good for small files, not large files. This sounds just like the RAPID program for my Samsung SSD that I can run on my computer. So I can see FastPath working for ESXi but maybe not so much for the VMs since by default I would assume a VM would have a virtual hard drive in the several GB size, so that would be difficult to cache 60GB.

I just think that having a RAID card that works well is all I need. What I have never done is take that PERC H310 and try a different version of software on it. It is worth a try I think. It doesn't need to be the latest version so long as it works and when I reboot the machine, the card is properly recognized and the speed jumps up a bit. My wallet is getting closer to being opened. I have Sophos on another ESXi machine (my test rig), testing it out today and I think I'll be taking the main ESXi machine down today and then working on the PERC card. But first I need to mount the test machine into a computer case. Then I need to find appropriate versions of firmware that I can place on the PERC H310 card.

 

[Black Ninja]

Fastpath is not a cache. It's quite the opposite actually , cause in order to work you have to disable all the caching features on the card. I am restraining myself from trying to explain it , because I don't think I do understand it well enough myself. I know what you meant about Samsung RAPID hoax, thankfully it's not that. Keep in mind that You don't have to use "fastpath" till you realize that you need it, but it's good to have the license for it already included with the card. Otherwise if you start buying additional licenses it's pricey.

I would gave up on the PERC card, in a fact I would stay away from any proprietory stuff. Dell hardware wants dell hardware to work fine. It's the same perhaps hardware like LSI cards, but with custom firmware which will not take lastest firmware from LSI web site, it will not like the drives if you put unless they are dell , and like Intel-Dell SSD that don't show SMART values.


P.S. I was tempted to buy Intel-Dell SSDs. When I learn that you can't update firmware, and unless is DEll raid card I can't even see their SMART I ran away the opposite way and I am so glad I did it. Now updating the firmware of the SSD is done with a click of a button on "intel toolbox software" and same thin with LSI with their software from Windows with a click of a button. I never update raid card from gui before, but I like it.

 

[joeschmuck]

Well I reverted the PERC back to it's original firmware and it ran like crap. I flashed it to LSI P19 and it ran like crap. I flashed it to P20 and it works again. I haven't tested it to see if I fixed the hang on soft-reboot or if it's faster but I doubt it. More to come of that tomorrow.

When I read about FastPass, I don't see how it could be anything other than a cache application. You can't make a SSD faster that it's own physical limitations, it's just not possible. The only answer is it's a cache. You may need to disable other cache's in the system in order for it to work best but I just don't see any other way to understand it.

Okay, maybe there is something else in play but nothing I have read indicates it's not a cache.

 

[Black Ninja]

Well I reverted the PERC back to it's original firmware and it ran like crap. I flashed it to LSI P19 and it ran like crap. I flashed it to P20 and it works again. I haven't tested it to see if I fixed the hang on soft-reboot or if it's faster but I doubt it. More to come of that tomorrow.

You know it won't help and you said it too. It's still kind of software raid you know, despite being on a hardware card it's not a real virtual drive( if I could say such a thing). That's why you esxi see it as ssd , cause it can see it what it is, with megaraid card it will only see what the raid card will show it.

When I read about FastPass, I don't see how it could be anything other than a cache application. You can't make a SSD faster that it's own physical limitations, it's just not possible. The only answer is it's a cache. You may need to disable other cache's in the system in order for it to work best but I just don't see any other way to understand it.

It's Fastpath, not Fastpass. It don't make SSD faster, it helps so they don't become much slower under raid. Have you ask yourself why raid0 SSD speed don't scale proportionally with the increase number of drives. Like why 8 SSD are not twice faster then 4 in raid. Fastpath is a way to have a more direct access to the SSD so you can preserve the speed that underlying SSDs are capable of, not to make them faster beyond their physical limitations. See how in your case your SSD perform even slower than what they actually can do by themselves.

 

[Black Ninja]

Let me ask you something unrelated I sure you know the answer , but for me it's kind of escaping the common sense and I don't get it:

If you want to setup you freenas to do scrub on 1st day every month at 3:00 am no matter what, is this how you set it up(see pics) ?

What is the relationship with the threshold value ?!

 

[joeschmuck]

From the user guide: Number of days since the last scrub completed before the next scrub can occur, regardless of the calendar schedule; the default is a multiple of 7 which should ensure that the scrub always occurs on the same day of the week.

The threshold value would need to be set to 28 to take into account 28 days in February if you wanted it to take place on the first of every month regardless of the day it falls on. That is not how most people would prefer it though, most would prefer to see a scrub done on say only a Sunday morning, which is how mine is setup.

 

[Black Ninja]

The threshold value would need to be set to 28 to take into account 28 days in February if you wanted it to take place on the first of every month regardless of the day it falls on

I read the manual I of course but.. Let use my case with the settings I show you. Which setting has higher priority "threshold" or what I set in calendar ?

Let's say I ran the Scrub manually on first of a month. Then I "enable" the scrub schedule as set above in pictures with threshold set to 35 is that mean that after 30 days it won't start automatically despite it's set in the calendar cause it has been ran 31 days ago ?


P.S. I am sorry but I don't know why I don't get the freenas "intuitiveness".

 

[Black Ninja]

What I don't understand is the purpose of the threshold in a relation with the schedule:
Is it to prevent from scrub from starting too often, or to actually start it if threshold was exceed without scrub ?

 

[Stux]

What I don't understand is the purpose of the threshold in a relation with the schedule:
Is it to prevent from scrub from starting too often, or to actually start it if threshold was exceed without scrub ?

If you wanted to set a schedule of every 4th Thursday, it'd make more sense. If you just want on the first of the month, then it doesn't really make much sense.

 

[joeschmuck]

Threshold has the higher priority.

Let's say I ran the Scrub manually on first of a month. Then I "enable" the scrub schedule as set above in pictures with threshold set to 35 is that mean that after 30 days it won't start automatically despite it's set in the calendar cause it has been ran 31 days ago ?

Yes and I would expect the next run to be the first of the following month, in essence you are skipping every other month.

What I don't understand is the purpose of the threshold in a relation with the schedule:
Is it to prevent from scrub from starting too often, or to actually start it if threshold was exceed without scrub ?

It's so you can setup a scrub to occur on a specific day of the week but skip 35 days, basically once a month. If you set it up to 14 days and every Sunday, every day, every 3:00AM, then it would run every 2 weeks on Sunday at 3:00 AM.

 

[joeschmuck]

Also I didn't explain it well but you could set Threshold to a value of 1 if you like and then set your other parameters to have it occur only on the first of the month. So long as Threshold is less than the number of days in a month it would do what you desire.

 

[Stux]

Really looking forward to FN10's maintenance calendar view.

 

[Black Ninja]

If you wanted to set a schedule of every 4th Thursday, it'd make more sense. If you just want on the first of the month, then it doesn't really make much sense.

Right , but the question is will it affect , like stop my set schedule on 1st from running just because threshold is high ?!

 

[joeschmuck]

Really looking forward to FN10's maintenance calendar view.

Played with that some. It will take some getting use to. I'm holding off further FN10 testing until after the new year I think. We have a long ways to go and I'm not in a hurry. I think because I'm not a fan of the user interface, java and whatnot. I dislike browser dependencies and I don't like using Chrome. It works like crap at work. I have a new hire and he's all about Chrome, loves it. It seems like a few times a week he will tell me he can't do something on the internet, some company website or military website isn't working. Now I just ask him if he's using Chrome and then I get silence. He opens FireFox or IE and the problem is solved.

Right , but the question is will it affect , like stop my set schedule on 1st from running just because threshold is high ?!

YES

 

[joeschmuck]

I suspect you would perform a scrub every other month. Set the Threshold to 28 or less.

 

[Black Ninja]

Also I didn't explain it well but you could set Threshold to a value of 1 if you like and then set your other parameters to have it occur only on the first of the month. So long as Threshold is less than the number of days in a month it would do what you desire.

I think I start getting it. So in my case I have to set the threshold to anything less than 28 days and that's how my 1st of the month schedule will not be prevented from running , right ?

 

[joeschmuck]

I think I start getting it. So in my case I have to set the threshold to anything less than 28 days and that's how my 1st of the month schedule will not be prevented from running , right ?

Yes. Set it for 28 or less. Think of it this way, if you ran a scrub on February 1st, then 28 days later you can run a scrub again if you like but if it were 27 days or less, the scrub would be prevented from running. Since March 1st is 29 days since the last scrub, it would be permitted to run.

There are a lot of possibilities on how to configure the scrubbing some once you know what you want to do, it's not too hard to figure out what the settings need to be.

 

[Stux]

You might want to consider setting it to 14. Ie it's the minimum amount of time between scrubs.

This means if you change your scrub day from 1st to 15th, you won't have to wait 45 days for the next scrub.

 

[Black Ninja]

I think I got it almost. So it should matter if I set threshold for 2 days or 20 days in my case , right ? It's still less than 28.

I just don't what this threshold to start scrubbing on it's own when it's value was exceeded. Like the setting in freenas where you set a threshold for boot drive scrub, and if it's set to 35days , it will start automatically as soon as you exceed the 35 days no matter what. You know what I mean ?