HBA/IT capable RAID controller for Linux, SMART passthrough

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storrgie

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Feb 6, 2010
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I have been using these AOC-USAS-L8i controllers for about 8 months now. I have two of them in my Norco 4220 connecting 16 Hitachi 2TiB drives. A constant nagging factor for me is that this particular controller has issues in linux with the mptsas driver, and will not allow from access from the smart daemon. Bug Report: Bug 14831

I see now at the bottom where someone is commenting that the new mptsas driver and the new lsi controllers has the same issue. I had planned on buying new controllers sometime soon and am very disappointed in seeing this.

Please give me advice as to what you gentleman would use to power 16-20 drives in this case (SFF-8087 connectors). I spent around 300$ total on my cards right now, I could spend more (and most certainly will have to) but I don't want to blow $1k just so I can see my smart information.

I am using Ubuntu Linux 10.04 and mdadm to manage my storage pools.
 
The SMART passthrough itself is not the problem. It seems that on LSI 1068E based controllers a specific set of actions can cause the controller to not be able to communicate with the drive. I exchanged my controller to a SAS2008 based one and could not cause the controller to offline a drive yet.

Please note that the SMART passthrough kernel messages are not real errors, but just the way the SAS subsystem passes ATA messages. These messages were still there after the controller upgrade. All of these messages are gone after a kernel upgrade to 2.6.32-23, but I think the problem with the 1068E controllers persists.

Some users here are going to suggest a HP SAS expander as a cheap solution to connect up to 32 drives to a single controller. I have one of these, but I could not get it to work with 3 Gbps signaling speed to the drives. I plan to exchange the expander with a second SAS2008 based controller
 
Did you get SuperMicro to exchange the controller for you? I emailed them and they never responded to let me know if I had any options.
 
This is OpenSolaris, but I could query my drives behind the 1068E to get temps and other data, it would just litter syslog with 'ATA soft errors'. Cannot double-check at the moment since I just reinstalled OpenSolaris, and haven't had a chance to reinstall smartctl yet.
 
I was the one who reported having the same issue with mpt2sas card/driver. Out of frustration in getting 1068E to work I ordered a new mpt2sas card, installed it, repoed same exact issue, took it out and went back to 1068E.

Lucky for me about the same time someone randomly posted a patch to the mptsas driver that fixes the passthrough issue. Since applying alignment patch to 4.18.00.00 driver I've had basically no issues with 1068E. After getting things to work I've not touched anything in fear of it breaking again ;).

I still have the mpt2sas controller and will eventually put it to use when I need more space and get a norco 4224.... but yeah I hate LSI. If anyone can suggest a perfect card for Linux + SAS + Expanders I'd happily jump ship.
 
The problem with all newer LSI drivers is that they need some fixes to compile with newer kernels. I tried with 4.22.00.00, but I do not know if and how I can get it to compile with my 2.6.32 kernel. I also would be glad to go back to my 1068E based controllers, but I had no issues with SAS2008 based ones.

Is there a patch available for version 4 LSI drivers to compile with recent kernels? Which kernel version did you use?

It seems that Areca controllers are working quite well with Linux and expanders. I'll wait till they release the 1880 controller series and then consider Areca again.
 
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