MFI drivers?

[Ender117]

Hi


I put some disks behind a Dell H310 mini as non-raid and they appear as /dev/mfisyspd0, which suggest that they are loaded with mfi driver instead of mrsas driver.

I found out that smartctl does not work well with mfi devices but I got around this by using /dev/passX instead. Might have to use DIY scripts instead of GUI for SMART monitoring/testing but no big deal. Is there any other gotchas I am not aware of?


PS: Unfortunately it cannot be flashed with a LSI firmware or you will brick it.

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

I previously used an LSI 9271 in JBOD mode, and smartd would not detect the drives. If I manually added the drives to the smartd.conf file and restarted smartd, it would monitor the drives. That kludge will not survive a reboot. You have to do it manually after startup every time.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Is there any other gotchas I am not aware of?

Horrid performance thanks to the Dell firmware's queue depth of 25.

 

[Chris Moore]

Hi


I put some disks behind a Dell H310 mini as non-raid and they appear as /dev/mfisyspd0, which suggest that they are loaded with mfi driver instead of mrsas driver.

I found out that smartctl does not work well with mfi devices but I got around this by using /dev/passX instead. Might have to use DIY scripts instead of GUI for SMART monitoring/testing but no big deal. Is there any other gotchas I am not aware of?


PS: Unfortunately it cannot be flashed with a LSI firmware or you will brick it.

Rip that H310 mini card out and throw it away. Put a regular H310 flashed with IT firmware in a PCIe slot.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[Ender117]

Rip that H310 mini card out and throw it away. Put a regular H310 flashed with IT firmware in a PCIe slot.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

Would you mid elaborate more why this is so bad? I don't think the r620 can boot from a 3rd party HBA (I least it cant do so from my 9207 8e). Besides I plan to use it for boot drive and maybe L2ARC

 

[Ender117]

Horrid performance thanks to the Dell firmware's queue depth of 25.

Good catch. I read lots of complaints on H310's performance running raid (raid1 and even raid5). I was hoping using non-raid was better.
diskinfo -i actually reports ~67k IOPS 4K read for my s3500 boot drive, which is very close to spec(70K). Maybe when I put in more SSDs I will be bottlenecked.

 

[Chris Moore]

Would you mid elaborate more why this is so bad? I don't think the r620 can boot from a 3rd party HBA (I least it can't do so from my 9207 8e). Besides I plan to use it for boot drive and maybe L2ARC

Boot from something else. It is completely unsatisfactory for ZFS because it can't be flashed to IT mode. ZFS / FreeNAS needs direct access to the drives for monitoring the system health. Without that, you just as well use Windows.

You might be alright as long as you don't use it for any storage drives, but It is the cause of the amber flasher in the GUI and that is not something they will fix because you are using unsupported hardware.

 

[Ender117]

Boot from something else. It is completely unsatisfactory for ZFS because it can't be flashed to IT mode. ZFS / FreeNAS needs direct access to the drives for monitoring the system health. Without that, you just as well use Windows.

You might be all right as long as you don't use it for any storage drives, but It is the cause of the amber flasher in the GUI and that is not something they will fix because you are using unsupported hardware.

Unfortunately for the only other boot options for my hardware are H710p or other true HW raid card, USB sticks/SD cards, network boots...... I might get burnt some day but I figured it won't be something catastrophic like data losses if it's just used for boot drive and L2ARC

(I believe) Lacking SMART monitoring on these drives should be fine, though nice to have. I am more interested in if there are any other known issues with mfi devices......

Now that if I need to expand over 24 drives I will certainly look into get a supermicro and put r620 into a ESXi cluster. Maybe someday......

PS: it's not showing any warning for me in GUI, I am on 11.6-U6


Edit:Ahh I found a post on LSI cards and looks like most older raid cards uses mfi drivers, that might be why you get alerted. But this is actually an improvement for me as I can get smart info through /dev/passX, and able to hot add disks as oppose to H710p

 

[Ender117]

Hi

I just want to follow up that I managed to get these drives loaded as /dev/daX following this:http://freebsd.1045724.x6.nabble.co...ad-on-LSI-MegaRAID-SAS-9260-8i-td6107296.html

During install, press E to edit boot commands, add the following lines:

Code:

set kFreeBSD.hw.mfi.allow_cam_disk_passthrough=1
set kFreeBSD.mfip_load=“YES"

then press ctrl+X to boot

Then the drives loaded up as regular da devices. I am now installing FreeNAS, presumably this will also solve the SMART issue.

Update: no it didn't work. after editing the loader in gui and reboot, both da and mfisyspd shows up for the same drive