bigphil
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- Jan 30, 2014
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- 486
looked to see if I could disable the P420i in BIOS, but I was not able to find an option to disable it. I
It's there...under PCI devices on the main menu in the BIOS you can disable the P420i.
looked to see if I could disable the P420i in BIOS, but I was not able to find an option to disable it. I
It's there...under PCI devices on the main menu in the BIOS you can disable the P420i.
99% of RAID cards that do "passthrough" or "jbod" mode still hide critical information (i.e. SMART) from the system and should NOT be used unless that support being flashed to IT mode firmware and have be flashed.
Perhaps its supporting a special driver/module for the card. In any case, A proper HBA can be had for under $50 and will resolve your issues as well as provide better/more consistent performance.
Something else I noticed, I am having trouble reading S.M.A.R.T. info on *most* of the drives in FreeNAS.
In the CLI, I can run "smartctl -c /dev/da4" followed by "smartctl -a /dev/da4" and looking at the info, I see:
SMART support is: Unavailable - device lacks SMART capability.
I find this interesting, because I can boot into CentOS 7 on a USB stick on the same server (dl380p g8), and run the same commands and get the results of the short SMART test.
The weird thing is, SMART does work on drive da2. But none of the others.
I am going to pop my IT flashed Perc H310 back in and see if I can get the SMART commands to work.
hpssacli
. HP has little to no support for FreeBSD, so I installed Ubuntu Server 16.04 on one of my test boxes and installed the hpssacli-2.40-13.0_amd64.deb package from https://downloads.linux.hpe.com/sdr/repo/mcp/pool/non-free/, and Viola! The command inside hpssacli iscontroller slot=X modify hbamode=on
I am sure that would be fine. That is 12G SAS HBA which is probably more than you need. I believe the internal SAS expander in that server is only 6G. A 9207-8i would be cheaper, and I can personally attest to those working working. I strongly suspect the 9300-8i would work, but I don't have any personal experience with it. I think you might also need different cables to hook to the SAS expander, but I don't know for sure.What about using the LSI 9300-8i HBA?
Yes you are right. I am now looking for some of these cables to convert to the internal 6Gbps internal expanders.... Oh well.I am sure that would be fine. That is 12G SAS HBA which is probably more than you need. I believe the internal SAS expander in that server is only 6G. A 9207-8i would be cheaper, and I can personally attest to those working working. I strongly suspect the 9300-8i would work, but I don't have any personal experience with it. I think you might also need different cables to hook to the SAS expander, but I don't know for sure.
Thanks to everyone for your recommendations! Looks like I'm just going to get a HBA then.
I've heard some horror stories about the fans ramping up to 100% when non-HP cards are used, so that's why I'm looking at the H220. Can you confirm that this does not happen with the LSI 9207?
@kdragon75
I've got two Dell Perc H310's (LSI 9211-8i) cards that are flashed to IT mode. And they do work as they should. I was just hoping I could get the onboard card to work as it should, since it says it's supported in FreeBSD, and so the fans would run super slow with all original HP hardware. No biggie. Just pointing out my experience.
I have absolutely no idea why I allowed myself to waste a ton of time on this, but I did. Perhaps it is because it hurts my pride to lose to equipment, but I do have an answer to a question that no longer matters to me. :) None of the version of HP SSA that I could find will let you mess with the actual settings in the controller (A P822 in my case), but you can do it withhpssacli
. HP has little to no support for FreeBSD, so I installed Ubuntu Server 16.04 on one of my test boxes and installed the hpssacli-2.40-13.0_amd64.deb package from https://downloads.linux.hpe.com/sdr/repo/mcp/pool/non-free/, and Viola! The command inside hpssacli is
and that is it. I think there is an abbreviation for controller (cntrl or something like that), but I don't feel like swapping the disks back to Ubuntu to find out. OMFG! I looked for this for years, and now I can find it because I don't need it any longer. Hopefully it helps someone else. I will say from may past experience using a CISS controller in RAID mode (not doing it any longer, don't roast me!), it is pretty good about sending alerts when a drive is going bad. I am still much happier with the LSI 9207. Sigh...Code:controller slot=X modify hbamode=on
The real problem here would be if this was still running through the CISS driver. I don't know the specifics of the more modern HP controllers, but I find it unlikely that they actually work in a true HBA mode that doesn't still involve the CISS driver, which is known to be quirky. The thing that we know works really well is the LSI HBA driver (the non-mfi drivers, mps/mpt).
Can you make the drives accessible on your FreeNAS? Absolutely, without a doubt, and there are even ways to get SMART data, just as there are with the 3Ware or Areca cards. The problem is that you're really out there on your own with a poorly tested and unsupported card, doing highly demanding I/O tasks, and there's a much higher chance of instability or issues.
The real problem here would be if this was still running through the CISS driver. I don't know the specifics of the more modern HP controllers, but I find it unlikely that they actually work in a true HBA mode that doesn't still involve the CISS driver, which is known to be quirky. The thing that we know works really well is the LSI HBA driver (the non-mfi drivers, mps/mpt).
Can you make the drives accessible on your FreeNAS? Absolutely, without a doubt, and there are even ways to get SMART data, just as there are with the 3Ware or Areca cards. The problem is that you're really out there on your own with a poorly tested and unsupported card, doing highly demanding I/O tasks, and there's a much higher chance of instability or issues.
da1 at ciss0 bus 32 scbus1 target 1 lun 0 da1: <ATA ST3000VN000-1H41 SC43> Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device da1: Serial Number XXXXXXX da1: 135.168MB/s transfers da1: 2861588MB (5860533168 512 byte sectors) da0 at ciss0 bus 32 scbus1 target 0 lun 0 da0: <ATA ST3000VN000-1HJ1 SC60> Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device da0: Serial Number XXXXXXX da0: 135.168MB/s transfers da0: 2861588MB (5860533168 512 byte sectors) da2 at ciss0 bus 32 scbus1 target 2 lun 0 da2: <ATA ST3000VN000-1HJ1 SC60> Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device da2: Serial Number XXXXXXX da2: 135.168MB/s transfers da2: 2861588MB (5860533168 512 byte sectors) da3 at ciss0 bus 32 scbus1 target 3 lun 0 da3: <ATA ST3000VN000-1HJ1 SC60> Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device da3: Serial Number XXXXXXX da3: 135.168MB/s transfers da4 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus6 target 0 lun 0 da4: <SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0 1.00> Removable Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device da4: Serial Number XXXXXXX da4: 40.000MB/s transfersda3: 2861588MB (5860533168 512 byte sectors) da4: 29327MB (60062500 512 byte sectors) da4: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE> da5 at umass-sim1 bus 1 scbus7 target 0 lun 0 da5: <SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0 1.00> Removable Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device da5: Serial Number XXXXXXX da5: 40.000MB/s transfers da5: 29327MB (60062500 512 byte sectors) da5: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>
da3 at mps0 bus 0 scbus3 target 59 lun 0 da3: <ATA WDC WD80EMAZ-00W 0A83> Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device da3: 600.000MB/s transfers da3: Command Queueing enabled da3: 7630885MB (15628053168 512 byte sectors)
da0 at mpt0 bus 0 scbus2 target 0 lun 0 da0: <VMware Virtual disk 1.0> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device da0: 320.000MB/s transfers (160.000MHz, offset 127, 16bit) da0: Command Queueing enabled da0: 18432MB (37748736 512 byte sectors) da0: quirks=0x140<RETRY_BUSY,STRICT_UNMAP>
ciss0: <HP Smart Array 6i> port 0x5000-0x50ff mem 0xf7ef0000-0xf7ef1fff,0xf7e80000-0xf7ebffff irq 24 at device 4.0 on pci2 ciss0: [ITHREAD] da0 at ciss0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0 da0: <COMPAQ RAID 0 OK> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device da0: 135.168MB/s transfers da0: Command Queueing enabled da0: 1907697MB (3906963632 512 byte sectors: 255H 32S/T 65535C) da0: quirks=0x1<NO_SYNC_CACHE>
Well, it seems that's the case with the P420i
Code:da1 at ciss0 bus 32 scbus1 target 1 lun 0 da1: <ATA ST3000VN000-1H41 SC43> Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device
Well, that's kind of tragic. The ciss driver has historically been flaky especially when it comes to problematic disks.
The good news is that as long as you're able to get SMART data off of them, some portion of the issues that we have with RAID cards might not be a problem for you.
The thing that would be interesting to examine, in this case, is whether or not this is truly HBA passthru or if the RAID card is still trying to do caching and other speed optimizations. I don't have time to discuss that today, sorry. I suppose it'd also be really interesting is if it supported hot-swap and error reporting correctly. You don't happen to have a small pile of variously-failing SATA disks hanging around, do you? :)
I'd love for it to work correctly. Having suffered through the CISS trainwreck years ago, I'm doubtful. Perhaps that's unfair.
The hpsa driver is a SCSI driver, while its predecessor was a block-layer driver. Hpsa combines traditional HP Smart Array driver and controller technology with the large body of Linux community development on the SCSI storage layer. Hpsa retains Smart Array reliability but enables these devices to benefit from the continuing development of the Linux SCSI layer. This results in better error handling, enhanced device management, and quick integration with standard system tools and utilities that rely on the SCSI subsystem. These benefits do not affect data or array configuration compatibility. Hpsa maintains compatibility with pre-existing storage configurations and data from systems using the cciss driver.