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Basic SAS HBA that works with Linux

M

memilanuk

n00b
Joined
Oct 7, 2010
Messages
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Recent discussions have me leaning towards an external 4-bay SAS/SATA drive enclosure + an SAS HBA to connect to my existing Linux box. Given the wide range of products available... is there a simple, basic (and hopefully not-too-expensive) SAS HBA that would work for connecting an external enclosure like this one, that works reliably with Linux software raid? I started out looking at the Areca 1300x4 but now I'm kind of leery of it as most of the reports I've found say that the available drivers aren't very good/reliable.

TIA,

Monte
 
Any particular model that you've used and know it works?


Also... seems like a lot of the controllers list Linux as in RHEL 4 or 5, or SLES 9 or 10. Since those releases are a couple years old (at least) what are the odds of the hardware working okay with more current Debian/Ubuntu releases?
 
I've found that the support for LSI controllers, at least the SAS2 ones, has been improving over the past several kernel releases. The drivers with the 2.6.37 kernel (I am using megaraid_sas) are working well for me. I think the mpt2sas drivers have also gotten better, but I do not have much experience with those.
 
memilanuk said:
Any particular model that you've used and know it works?


Also... seems like a lot of the controllers list Linux as in RHEL 4 or 5, or SLES 9 or 10. Since those releases are a couple years old (at least) what are the odds of the hardware working okay with more current Debian/Ubuntu releases?
Click to expand...

I haven't used any of them personally. Closest I've come is my company's Dell server which has a PERC 5/i (another LSI-based controller) and runs OpenSUSE 11.0. Works flawlessly.

With Linux it's usually the opposite way round to what you wrote - support gets better over time, not worse.
 
I didn't necessarily mean the support got worse... but I've been getting the impression that a lot of the 'support' and 'drivers' for various RAID cards and HBAs may say 'Linux' but on closer inspection they seem to often be proprietary binary-only drivers, packaged for specific distributions (RHEL4, SLES9, etc.) If I was only planning on using them on newer versions of the same (CentOS, OpenSuSE, etc.) then I probably wouldn't worry overmuch. I'm looking more at Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS... and while there are ways to use packages from one system in another, I'd prefer something that works 'out of the box', as in I plug in the card, put the drives in the enclosure, connect the cable and power everything up and begin the install process without having to jump through too many hoops (ideally, none).
 
LSI drivers are open source. I'm using SAS2008/mpt2sas based cards and did not have any issues since 2.6.35. Currently I'm on 2.6.37 with Ubuntu 10.04LTS and while the recent kernels seem to break some tools that rely on communicating with the kernel (ietd for example), the controllers seem to be very stable.
 
omniscence said:
LSI drivers are open source. I'm using SAS2008/mpt2sas based cards and did not have any issues since 2.6.35. Currently I'm on 2.6.37 with Ubuntu 10.04LTS and while the recent kernels seem to break some tools that rely on communicating with the kernel (ietd for example), the controllers seem to be very stable.
Click to expand...

They are also in the mainline kernel so you may not need to install the driver separately provided you have a kernel from 2010 or your distro backports hardware drivers to whatever older kernel they use.

I am using 2 these at work with 2.6.37 for the last week. They appear to be working well with my drives. I have run 2TB hitachi drives on them and 750 and 500 GB seagate 7200.10s and 7200.11s (migrating to hitachi 2TB).
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...117157&cm_re=SAS_intel-_-16-117-157-_-Product

Note: These are not the mpt2sas cards but the older mptsas cards.
 
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Anyone here used an Adaptec 1045 non-RAID HBA with anything other than RHEL/CentOS or SuSE?
 
drescherjm said:
They are also in the mainline kernel so you may not need to install the driver separately provided you have a kernel from 2010 or your distro backports hardware drivers to whatever older kernel they use.

I am using 2 these at work with 2.6.37 for the last week. They appear to be working well with my drives. I have run 2TB hitachi drives on them and 750 and 500 GB seagate 7200.10s and 7200.11s (migrating to hitachi 2TB).
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...117157&cm_re=SAS_intel-_-16-117-157-_-Product

Note: These are not the mpt2sas cards but the older mptsas cards.
Click to expand...

I used to have two of those in my server but upgraded to 9211-8i because with 2.6.32-34 the 1068e based controllers produced a lot of errors in conjunction with SMART often leading to a complete dropout of the whole controller. I think the SMART issue got fixed and what you say confirms that.
 
Just a note... I appreciate the glowing reviews of some of these LSI controllers, but please keep in mind I'm looking to use it with an *external* drive enclosure. I realize LSI makes cards for that too; just thought I'd reiterate the intended application.
 
You can easily turn any internal controller into an external one at the cost of a single slot bracket.
 
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