which sata card (raid?)

L

ltickett

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 27, 2000
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i just had my new fileserver case delivered (15 bay supermicro SATA) and disks (8x 1.5TB samsung to start with)

the server came with 2x 8 port LSI Megaraid cards which i thought would be just what i needed- but here's the dilema...

in raid5 the biggest logical drive i seem to be able to create is 2TB (is this the same in all cards?)
the card doesn't support (pass through) or whatever it is called, so i can't hot swap (need to reboot and create new single disk "raid array" (i am thinking of using ZFS)
on top of all this when i have more than 6 logical drives freenas wont boot! (i have a compact flash card connected as primary slave on the motherboard)

what are my other options? i've started to hear about port multilpiers etc

thanks for your help :)
 
Windows still uses MBR partitions, and has limited GPT partition support. It also does not support filesystems without partitions. So you're locked into 32-bits of adressing, which apparently causes your 2TiB limit.

If you are going to use ZFS, then you won't be using any Hardware RAID capabilities, and you would want a REAL HBA card, not some raid chip in between which breaks your arrays and does all kind of bad things.

So my advice is: sell the megaraids, and get a real LSI 1068E card (SuperMicro USAS-L8i or Intel SASUC8i). URL of the Intel card:
http://www.intel.com/products/server/raid-controllers/SASUC8I/SASUC8I-overview.htm
 
PCI-X is ancient; if your motherboard does not have PCI-express then it belongs to a previous generation; still stuck in the "Pentium 4" generation of computers.

In my opinion, PCI and PCI-X should never be used and be avoided as if it were AIDS. It often means you have poor chips with lots of bugs, poor driver support with lots of bugs and poor performance, especially with ZFS or RAID. In some cases this might be an overreaction and some PCI-X cards are quite decent.

Since you already have a PCI-X based solution, your options are quite limited. If you are content with less than single disk performance, you can try PCI-X. But let me warn you: expect alot of performance problems, and if those are your only problems you can consider yourself lucky.

The best solution would be to buy a modern PCI-express motherboard and modern PCI-express controller, and gone are your problems.
 
i think it has 2x PCI-E slots actually. it's been a long while since i did any tinkering with "slot devices" and at first glance thought they were old PCI slots!

now i look closer i think it's 4xPCI-X and 2xPCI-E (perfect for 2x8 port sata cards :)

i'll see if i can find any you've suggested on eBay

cheers!
 
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