Adaptec and SuperMicro controllers

[CLEAR RTC]

Adaptec Question:
To preface I have read the forums and been reading the manual. I see in manual the Adaptec controllers are listed as supported but many and specifically Cyberjock have recommended against using them. OK so that's a no brainer I don't want to use them. However I have two existing Intel servers with Adaptec 31605 cards in them that are currently windows boxes that I want to turn into FreeNAS boxes, one is my BackupExec server and the other is a windows file server.

So I need to pitch to my boss why the perfectly good Adaptec cards (in the current windows environment) and are listed in the manuals hardware list should not be used. Is there a specific documented technological problem or incompatibility I can point to other than saying the forums don't recommend them? Then hopefully I can pick up some IBM M1015 cards from ebay.


SuperMicro question:
Info first. I currently have a FreeNAS 9.3 box in my environment. It's under powered but I have some upgrade bits coming to fix that thanks to Ebay before I eventually blow it away and bring it into real Production. Its a SuperMicro X7DVL-E board with an Intel E5310 CPU and 1GB of RAM (I know I am a bad boy for little RAM but this is a test box for now). Anyway I have a X5460 and 24GB of ECC RAM on the way.

The above box was once a CORAID NAS and was gifted to us with and came with two SuperMicro SAT2-MV8 cards. I have seen a few threads talking about slow performance with these cards, having said that I haven't seen any "yet" that discuss stability issue or other scary things. So far for me the cards have been working great I have managed over 100MBps transfers while moving under a few GB at a time over that and they start to drop off to 40-30Mbps but I have been attributing that to the my lack of RAM. Obviously the recommendation would also be some IBM M1015's here, but if I can get away with guys for now I'd like to. I guess my real question is are there any known scary data loss issue attributed to these or similar cards?

This old CORAID was installed with FreeNAS during a weekend when I was desperate for some storage I could move some VM's to during an prod issue with local storage on an ESXi box. This was all before a thorough read of the manual or forums.

Thanks in advance.

 

[jgreco]

The Adaptec controllers are RAID cards. See second paragraph of this sticky.

Additionally Adaptec does not provide documentation or support to the authors who wrote the drivers for FreeBSD. LSI provides documentation and also has developers working on the drivers. Tell me which is more likely to be "awesome" in the long run.

The MV8 cards are Marvell based cards. These have a sketchy history with FreeBSD for similar driver-oriented reasons but we do not actively hate them.

 

[CLEAR RTC]

Ahh that all makes good sense to me. Thanks for the link, I had actually seen that come up during a google search but didn't think it was relevant and didn't read it <slaps forehead>.

I'll plan to budget for 6 of the M1015 cards (2x each of the 3 servers)

Thanks for the help.

 

[jgreco]

I had actually seen that come up during a google search but didn't think it was relevant and didn't read it <slaps forehead>.

I didn't mean to imply that you were expected to have found the reference. The post is unambiguously labeled LSI so it would not be an obvious place to look. The paragraph on RAID, however, is applicable to any RAID controller, and the LSI page is a good place for you to end up so that you wind up with compatible controllers.

I can just be terse sometimes.