Advice on SATA controller

[Lutiana]

Hi Guys,

So I am rounding the finishing point for my NAS and my 2 4Tb drives arrived a few weeks back. I finally tried to get them installed in my NAS box only realize I had forgotten about the danged 2Tb barrier, so the 12 port SATA card I bought from ebay is more or less useless for what I want to do.

My plan is ultimately to have 4x4Tb drives and 4x1Tb drives in the thing, giving me a total of 10Tb mirrored (2x RAID 10 arrays).

So does anyone have an suggestions on an affordable SATA card that will work with 4Tb drives? I am hoping to get something with at least 4 ports, but 8 or 12 would be better. Obviously I don't care about RAID support on the card itself, and it would need to be PCI-X or regular PCI (though I think there might be a PCIe x8 slot in the server, I don't recall atm).

If I have to, I can switch out the box for something a little more desktop oriented, so I could put multiple PCI cards into it. At this point I'll take anything that will do 4Tb+ drives.

 

[gpsguy]

Check to see if you have a PCIe x8 slot.

If so, get pick up an IBM 1015 (~$100 US) on eBay and flash it to IT mode. With fanout cables, it'll support 8 drives.

 

[Lutiana]

Actually, turns out it's a PCIe x16 slot.

 

[Lutiana]

Check to see if you have a PCIe x8 slot.

If so, get pick up an IBM 1015 (~$100 US) on eBay and flash it to IT mode. With fanout cables, it'll support 8 drives.

Are there any instructions on how to do this? Also, to be clear, this card will support multiple 4Tb drives?

Also, from what I can gather this card will actually support up to 16 drives via SAS expanders, is this correct? I assume that means I need a 4 port expander, but I am not sure that works; I am mostly curious since I may do this down the line to add capacity.

EDIT: Found the instructions on how to flash it in IT mode here http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/ Though if I am understanding the article correctly I don't really need to flash it to this mode, since if it is configured as JBOD each drive will be seen and used by the OS. Is there a compelling reason to flash it?

 

[cyberjock]

Actually, it'll support up to 128 drives i believe with multiple SAS expanders cross connected. I have 24 drives on it right now.

 

[gpsguy]

Read the M1015 on Ebay thread for information about flashing the card. In the thread there's a link to "servethehome" where there are instructions on how to flash it. Note, read "M1015 on Ebay" thread - I followed those same instructions to flash the card for a forum member, only to find out there was newer firmware available.

 

[Lutiana]

Read the M1015 on Ebay thread for information about flashing the card. In the thread there's a link to "servethehome" where there are instructions on how to flash it. Note, read "M1015 on Ebay" thread - I followed those same instructions to flash the card for a forum member, only to find out there was newer firmware available.

O, great tip. Any idea what the latest version is? Or is V16 still good?

 

[Lutiana]

Actually, it'll support up to 128 drives i believe with multiple SAS expanders cross connected. I have 24 drives on it right now.

Can you confirm that it will support 4Tb drives by chance? I've been burned, and now I am a bit reluctant to buy this card without this confirmation.

 

[cyberjock]

It does.. using 3TB drives right now. If you read up you'd see its the current gen stuff.... 6Gb/sec SAS, etc.

 

[gpsguy]

It looks like v17 was released about a month ago.

Any idea what the latest version is? Or is V16 still good?

 

[Idiotzoo]

I recently went through some hair pulling trying to crossflash a M1015 to 9211 IT mode. In case it's useful, here's what worked.

I followed the advice here: http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/
and created a bootable USB. Did the first part of the process using the megarec command to clear the flash. Following the reboot ERROR: Failed to initialise PAL. Exiting Program.

So I ended up having to go down the EFI route found here: http://brycv.com/blog/2012/flashing-it-firmware-to-lsi-sas9211-8i/
but only the second command, as the card rom has already been cleared: sas2flash.efi -o -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom

Because I'm using a consumer gigabyte board, rather than a server board there is no efi shell. So I downloaded this: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ed...2/EdkShellBinPkg/FullShell/X64/Shell_Full.efi
renamed the file bootx64.efi and put it on the USB stick in /EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi

That let me get into an efi shell where I could flash the card.

Apologies if this is blindingly obvious, but it took me a while to pull these various threads together and get the card working nicely.

 

[Lutiana]

Ok, so I ordered 2 of these cards, one arrived today, the other will be here on Friday. My idea is to use Card 1 in my Xenserver with 4x1Tb drives in a RAID 10 array using the IR bios, the other will be flashed with the IT bios and used in my FreeNAS server with 4x4Tb drives.

I managed to do a UEFI flash via the motherboard's built in EFI boot and successfully flashed it to IR mode using the latest (17) bios. At first I missed the step to set the SAS id, but added that step in. Everything appeared have worked just fine.

So here is my problem, the card does not seem to detect any drives; at all! It did this before I flashed it, and continues to do it even after the flash. When I go into the BIOS (ctl-c) and select the RAID options then select RAID 1E or RAID 10 I get a blue screen that says the data will be erased from the selected drives, but the rest of the screen is blue, and pressing ENTER to create the array just drops me back to the main screen with no change.

I have tried:

1. Different PCIe slot
2. Different cables
3. Different Drives (I have a 160Gb drive lying around)
4. Verified that my 1Tb and 160Gb drives all work with the SATA ports on the motherboard.

Server specs are Intel S1200BTL Server board, 16Gb of RAM and an Intel Xeon Quad Core CPU (w/ HyperThreading, not sure of the exact model and speed).

What do you guys think? Bad card?

 

[cyberjock]

For starters.. if you have RAID options then you didn't flash it to IT mode. You even said IR mode(which I'm going to assume is a typo and you meant IT). But if you really did flash it to IR mode, you didn't do yourself any favors with regards to FreeNAS.

You should have no RAID options and no SAS menu or options if you flashed it correctly.

I don't think its a bad card. I think you flashed it wrong. ;)

 

[cyberjock]

Let me say this too before you tell me I'm confused(because I sort of was).

Support for FreeNAS on Xen is not really provided here because nobody uses it.. Even jgreco has mentioned http://forums.freenas.org/threads/a...ide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data.12714/ that Xen is in uncharted waters. It might work and it might not. If you plan to use it in any kind of production use I'd strongly recommend you use bare metal or ESXi.

If you have any problems they will pretty much be yours to figure out on your own as nobody here uses FreeNAS on Xen that I know of.

That being said, I have no idea how Xen will react to the card in any configuration. It might work and it might not. But I'd say bare-metal is a good place to start to prove the card works properly with FreeNAS. And that means you should be using IT mode only. I will tell you that if your card is flashed with v16 firmware in IT mode it should work out of the box with FreeNAS 9.x. If it doesn't then you've done something wrong or the card is bad. Considering that you were able to reflash the controller I find it very unlikely that the card is bad(although you could ruin it by flashing it wrong).

Also, there is a difference between forward breakout cables and reverse breakout cables. They look the same but one will work for your situation and one won't. You should research what you bought and what you need and make sure you have the right type.

 

[Lutiana]

@Cyberjock - Thanks for the reply. Your confusion is most likely due to my lack of clarity, I am good at lacking clarity sometimes, especially when screwing around with firmware flashing.

So be to clear, I am talking about 2 totally different physical servers here. The first is a Xenserver (the SB1200BTL board), the second is a FreeNAS server (an IBM ML150G5); I have no intention of running FreeNAS in a VM; I am crazy, but not that crazy. I am, however, using an M1015 as the RAID controller in both servers - Raid 10 in the Xenserver and passthrough in the FreeNAS server.

Now with regards to IR vs IT, the site I was reading said IR was the RAID mode, and IT was passthrough. So my goal is to have the M1015 in the Xenserver to handle the RAID 10, so it'll need to be in RAID (IR?) mode and the card in the FreeNAS server will act as a passthrough (IT?) controller.

Also, there is a difference between forward breakout cables and reverse breakout cables. They look the same but one will work for your situation and one won't. You should research what you bought and what you need and make sure you have the right type.

Shit! That's got to be it. You nailed it. I had no idea that the cables were actually different, now I know. They came with a different card I bought for someone else a long time ago, the standard SATA connectors were on the RAID card (a 3Ware 12 port card), and the other end must have gone to some sort of drive enclosure. So I guess that means they are backward breakout cables? Or forward break out cables? Which ones do I need?

 

[Lutiana]

Also, there is a difference between forward breakout cables and reverse breakout cables. They look the same but one will work for your situation and one won't. You should research what you bought and what you need and make sure you have the right type.

Right, got my new cables today. Worked like a charm. I now have one flashed with the IR mode, and a nice 4x1Tb RAID 10 array in my Xenserver, which Xen is very happy with. And the second card has been flashed in the IT mode and in my HP server with 4x4Tb drives and FreeNAS running nicely.

Thanks everyone for the advice and the help.