Interesting SAS hba

[kharan5876]

I was looking for a SAS or SATA card to setup my backup server. Unfortunatly FreeBSD does not support the marvell sata driver so that nice cheap $100 8 port supermicro pci-x card will not work.

I was browsing ebay and grabbed this for $50.

It uses the lsi 1068 chip and it has a built in sas expander. 12 internal ports and 3 4x external ports. I don't know if the internal and external ports are linked together or if they are separate for a total of 24. I don't have the proper SAS cable to try it.

The card takes a long time to initialize in the bios. I connected 3 SATA drives and they were recognized in the OS and bonnie++ reported good performance so everything seems to work just fine.

The card appears to be manufactured by Isilon and in the lsi bios says its an isilon expander. Isilon sells NAS storage nodes so I am guessing this card is an internal component for one of those.

I'm trying to contact Isilon to see if they have any firmware updates for the card. I didnt see anything on the site for the card itself and they may not offer an upgrade if you don't have a service support contract.

I'm guessing a raw lsi 1068 firmware update would probably not work.

 

[odditory]

never heard of it, but hell for $50 why not?

 

[kharan5876]

I was very happy to see 12 ports too. I have 10 drive bays to use for the backup disks. If it was just an 8 port card id have to use 2 of the onboard SATA ports which would just have been so not cool

 

[sabregen]

interesting. I just applied for a few jobs in the Seattle area for Isilon... I would NOT recommend the LSI 1068 BIOS update on that card. the 1068 supports SAS expanders down the chain (as in, in the storage enclosure) but Isilon has put the expander on the card already. Per LSI 1068 specs, I would expect that use of any external connection (which incidentally is Infiniband, BTW) would disable a bank of 4x internal ports. I am pretty sure the limitation, even with expanders, on the 1068 chipset is 12 total devices. These are the same chips that end up in Dell SAS5/i, 5/iR, 5/i and 6/iR controllers, amongst many others. neat card. it actually looks like maybe it came out of a NAS head that broke, and someone scavenged the controller.

 

[UICompE02]

I am pretty sure the limitation, even with expanders, on the 1068 chipset is 12 total devices.

I'm not sure what expander is on that board, but I do know for sure that a 1068 can easily support well over 100 devices with the proper expanders connected to it. My first guess is that it's a 24- or 36-port PMC expander, with 4 of the ports connected to the 1068 (you can't make an 8-wide connection to the 1068 from a single device), and the other four links of the 1068 are probably wired to one of the external ports. You may be able to figure out some information about the connections by following the traces on the PCB.

 

[kharan5876]

Isilon does not have support for individual components in our systems. In order to open a support ticket we would need the serial number from an Isilon node with an active support contract. Please let us know if you do have a supported cluster and we can move forward with your support request.

Bastards..