Anyone use the DELL SAS 6/IR controller?

[Tekkie]

As the subject line says, anyone use the DELL SAS 6/IR controller in FreeNAS8? It has 8 ports and is only £52 with DeLL in the UK.

 

[Ralph]

Hi,

I have just setted up a DELL PowerVault NX300 with PERC H700 (the last raid controller from DELL) and FreeNAS 8.0 works like a charm.
And PERC6 seems to be supported >> http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.2R/hardware.html

regards,

 

[Tekkie]

Decided to buy one of these babies with an additional 5 hdd :) will build a nice 11 drive RAIDZ3 + 60GB SSD cache drive.

 

[Tekkie]

Just as a FYI if you do decide to use this HBA make sure you get this CD image: http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1035949557&postcount=10 and flash the thing to be a fully functional LSI 1068E HBA in TI mode, the board model you want to choose is 3081.

More info on the adapter: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1036388001

 

[jfelpel]

Are there any special config steps to make a perc 6i work? I have flashed it with the LSI TI Firmware. The card loads with the BIOS and detects the drives, but FreeNAS does not show the drives as available options. any ideas?

Also, let me know if I should start this as a new thread...

-JF

 

[firestorm99]

jfelpel, a bit more information about your system would be nice. (my perc 6i just passed customs and is arriving soon, will report my experiences).

 

[freeflow]

Yes. Plugged into a P35 based motherboard via a x8 PCI slot. Worked strainght out of the box with 8 new drives. Now part of a 10 drive ZFS2 pool. Takes a little while for the card to initialise.

 

[jfelpel]

sure. Guess its not as easy as a quick config change.

my sys:
Tyan S2895 mobo
1 X AMD 285 (had 2, one was bad, a replacement is on the way.)
4GB Memory (another 4 when i get the replacement CPU)
Perc 6/i (flashed to the LSI IT firmware. i will have to wait until I get home to get the firmware version)
3 2TB HDs
4GB CF in a CF to IDE adapter for the OS

I may have just been impatient. I will boot it up again tonight and give it some time to initialize.

 

[jfelpel]

Sorry everyone. I pulled a idiot move. My mobo has two PCI-E slots, one controlled by each of the two CPU's. In the of trouble shooting to get the software installed, I figured out I had a bad CPU, so I pulled it. I had also pulled all non essentials. I then put it all back together without the one bad CPU. I had my video card in slot 1 and my Perc 6i in slot 2. Turns out that slot 1 is linked into CPU1 and slot 2 is linked into CPU2. With no CPU 2, the slot with my PERC in it was not even powering up.

long story short. It works now.

 

[tmacka88]

Do these SAS controllers work with any motherboard or are they limited o server MB?

 

[survive]

Hi tmacka88,

In an ideal world, a SAS 6 should work in anything with a slot you can fit the card into....PCI-Express doesn't really care, it doesn't distinguish between a video card or RAID card sound card or NIC.

In my experience it doesn't always go quite so smooth.

I have a couple of SAS 5i/r's and on a Gigabyte 790GX board I was trying to use it on it ran into a problem where the HBA BIOS couldn't load....it ran out of room because the system BIOS couldn't load it into the 640k available when the BIOS loads. I contacted LSI and got Gigabyte support talking and a couple of days later I had a BIOS that worked.

Asus has a tech note somewhere on their support site (I can't find it right now) that basically says that they don't support the use of anything that's not a graphics card in their desktop boards, so with them you might be out of luck.

One more thing I can add is some controllers, when used on Intel boards, require you to do the "tape trick" that involves masking a couple of the pins on the card edge connector with tape or nail polish to prevent an SMbus error on boot. Take a look here:

http://www.overclock.net/raid-controllers-software/359025-perc-5-i-raid-card-tips.html

under "SMBus Issue with Intel Chipsets".

-Will

 

[firestorm99]

I just tested my Dell 6/IR in FreeNAS. It is recognized flawlessly. It also works with the IT firmware flashed on.

FreeNAS Version: 8.0.1 AMD64, i5, 8GB Ram

BootLog:

Code:

pcib0: <ACPI Host-PCI bridge> port 0xcf8-0xcff on acpi0
pci0: <ACPI PCI bus> on pcib0
pcib1: <ACPI PCI-PCI bridge> irq 16 at device 1.0 on pci0
pci1: <ACPI PCI bus> on pcib1
mpt0: <LSILogic SAS/SATA Adapter> port 0xe000-0xe0ff mem 0xfb910000-0xfb913fff,0xfb900000-0xfb90ffff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci1
mpt0: [ITHREAD]
mpt0: MPI Version=1.5.20.0
mpt0: Capabilities: ( RAID-0 RAID-1E RAID-1 )
mpt0: 0 Active Volumes (2 Max)
mpt0: 0 Hidden Drive Members (14 Max)

Here some stats with 5x 2TB WD Caviar Green with IR mode controller firmware (but raid disabled):

Write Speed: ~25GB ... 337.93023MB/s

Code:

[root@freenas] /mnt/tank/testset# time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=ddfile_ bs=1m count=25000 && sync"
25000+0 records in
25000+0 records out
26214400000 bytes transferred in 73.979769 secs (354345524 bytes/sec)
0.008u 9.042s 1:20.99 11.1%	24+1376k 0+3io 0pf+0w

Read Speed: ~25GB ... 178.67942MB/s
Can someone tell me, why the reading speed is so much slower (this was the case when using onboard sata ports too)? How could I improve this?

Code:

[root@freenas] /mnt/tank/testset# time sh -c "dd of=/dev/null if=ddfile_ bs=1m count=25000 && sync"
25000+0 records in
25000+0 records out
26214400000 bytes transferred in 139.915389 secs (187358947 bytes/sec)
0.038u 7.549s 2:19.91 5.4%	26+1484k 0+3io 0pf+0w

Hope, I could help some of you with this information. :)


PS: If you want to enter the RAID Bios on a EFI board it may be useful to disable all boot devices in the efi and force bios mode (to give the initialisation of the controller bios enough time). Invoking the controller BIOS works using CTRL+C at the begin of the booting process.

 

[jfr2006]

Hi:

There's seems to be several type of DEL SAS 6/IR boards... Will this one be the correct one: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/DELL-JW06..._Components&hash=item3f0705eee6#ht_1366wt_915

Regards.

 

[survive]

Hi jfr2006,

I would think just about any SAS 6 card should work, the one you linked to certainly looks correct.

That said, I'd get an IBM BR10i instead. There are a couple up on ebay right now, the cheapest one I saw listed was $50.00 US instead of $80. The difference would pay for shipping and cables!

It's practically the same card as the SAS 6 but uses a different (newer?) cable connector. It can be easily flashed to what's called "IT" mode that eliminates the RAID abilities on the card and turns it into a dumb controller card, which is exactly what you want for ZFS. You can read more about the card here:

http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-br10i-lsi-sas3082e-r-pciexpress-sas-raid-controller/

I'm actually running one connected to 6 drives in an R3 case and a pair of .75M cables route really well through a one of the cable cut-outs on the motherboard mounting "plate" & up the back of the HDD cage.

-Will

 

[jfr2006]

I've been reading some things about this card and it seems it does not support drives of 3TB (or saying it other way, it will only use 2.2TB from the 3TB drive).

Can anyone confirm this?

Regards.

 

[firestorm99]

A hint:

For those who can't boot dell 6/i cards on their Intel mainboards this helped me out:

http://www.overclock.net/raid-controllers-software/359025-perc-5-i-raid-card-tips.html

You only have to tape 2 pins of the PCIe connector (disabling the smbus). Worked perfectly on my Intel DQ670W and a Dell 6/i.

 

[survive]

Hi jfr2006,

The LSI 1068 chips do behave the exact way you describe. They can't see more than 2.2 TB of a 3 TB disk. I think you need to move to an LSI 2008 series chip for 3TB drives.

-Will