HighPoint RocketRAID 2680 and ZFS?

G

Greatone123

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
May 10, 2006
Messages
1,293
I just noticed it on sale at newegg for $100

I was planning a future ZFS build using ZFSGuru and whatnot

but I was looking for cards to use and well ya sale and 2 SAS ports sounded like a good deal.


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115057


Would this be a compatible card to use, I know it says FreeBSD, but I also know that you don't use RAID, you let ZFS handle everything.
 
You should not use a RAID card in combination with ZFS. Doing so might mean you need a BBU, TLER capable harddrives and still might experience drive dropouts like traditional RAIDs commonly experience.

Instead, you would want a non-RAID HBA, exposing the disks directly to ZFS. This means the disk won't be detached on bad sectors; ZFS can then control what should happen, and in virtually all cases it can fix the damage and you won't even notice something was going on.

The Intel SASUC8i is the usual candidate for a ZFS controller; and it works on virtually all OS. You may need a flash to IT-firmware, though.

If you just need a few ports, then use your onboard SATA ports; better than your onboard SATA is impossible; these are the best ports you can have. Some motherboards have additional SATA not provided by the chipset but rather using some additional chip like Silicon Image and JMicron; i suggest you avoid these and use only chipset SATA + Addon controller. You can mix the ports from any controller together in one pool.
 
alright, I knew about the intel, was just hoping the same could be done with this since it's on sale... thx sub wasn't sure if you were around or I would of posted in your thread anyway since I already mentioned building the box
 
I think that can be used in JBOD though. I wonder what chip it uses?

Edit:Marvell 88SE6485
 
edit: Marvell actually is fakeRAID; like Silicon Image. So that would function as normal AHCI controller instead. But there are issues with Marvell; the LSI chips are much better generally; i didn't use my Marvell anymore after getting drive disconnects; could be an issue in the FreeBSD drivers, but i've heard more bad news from Marvell. I'd go with the safe route as far as your controller. How much is the Intel SASUC8i or SuperMicro USAS-L8i for you?

But the controller is an important part of a ZFS server, so buying the right part here is quite important. The LSI1068E could be with you for a long time.

Alternatively, you could buy the successor; the 6Gbps LSI SAS2008 controller. It should work with my latest builds, and works fine on Solaris also, but would be a more risky choice perhaps but still worth considering, especially if you want to use 6Gbps SSDs for L2ARC+ZIL and don't have onboard 6Gbps ports.
 
the SASUC8i will be fine, it's only $55 more, it's still cheap tho.. could use it in some form of windows system...
 
I have a 2640x4, which I think uses nearly the same Marvell chip. I personally would not use it for ZFS. For one thing, its JBOD support is kind of difficult to use. The drive has to be partitioned on a different controller. At that point it will recognize it as a "legacy" disk and you can use it in JBOD. But if you just plug a blank drive into the controller, you have to initialize it using the RAID firmware before it will be recognized. I believe you *can* tell the firmware to initialize it as a JBOD disk, but I believe even then it stores some metadata on the drive somewhere, because, if I remember correctly, the BIOS then reports it as a JBOD disk instead of legacy.

Also regardless of anything I said above, I don't think FreeBSD supports that chipset yet, so if nothing else that would be a showstopper.
 
Whats the word on the SASUC8i working in consumer motherboard PEG x16 slots? I had to return an LSI card because I couldn't get it to work in a x16 slot.
 
Could not get to work meaning you could not boot from it, or it was not detected inside your Solaris/FreeBSD OS? Some motherboards lack Int 19 capture on the PCIe x16 slot; but that would still allow FreeBSD to detect the controller.
 
I didn't realize there was a general problem with the SASUC8i on consumer MBs. I have an Intel BOXDG45ID (LGA775, G45 chipset, C2D 8400 CPU) that runs great with both the SASUC8i and an IBM ServeRaid BR10i, both flashed with LSI IT firmware. I also have plugged the Intel into a Gigabyte EX58-UD4p to flash it and didn't have any problems (though it was in the second x16 slot, which might actually be a x8)

Note that many motherboards with onboard video will disable the onboard controller if any PCIe card greater than 1x is plugged into the 16x slot. Maybe that's the issue that people are seeing? I'm not sure if that applies to the Intel board or not. I should probably try the IGP to see if it's still active. I just assumed it would be disabled, so instead I'm using an old ATI Rage Pro PCI card for basic video.
 
You could still run without videocard; it should still boot and work. Of course, this makes error diagnosis and crash recovery more painful. But i've used this on boards without onboard video to save the PCI-express x16 slot for an additional HBA.

Perhaps in the BIOS you can select the operation of the onboard graphics, sometimes it is set to 'AUTO' or something, but able to explicitly set to onboard graphics and select the lowest shared memory available to the graphics. Then save and exit, power off the machine, and put in the HBA on the graphics and see if it works. There should also be a BIOS option for which videocard to initialize first, and by default PCIe is the first device in that list; try setting it to the onboard graphics first, might solve this issue perhaps.
 
I could see the WebBIOS, but I couldn't enter it. I could enter the CLI bios though. In any case it would never detect any attached drives. I just had general problems with it, and from some researching others did as well.

I was just curious if anyone here has successfully used the Intel card in a pci 16x slot.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top