ZFS, Solaris, 3TB

T

tacomel1

n00b
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Apr 12, 2011
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My current setup:

* Supermicro SC846E1 - LSI SASX36 expander, 24 drive bays
* Supermicro X8DTN+-F motherboard
* Supermicro AOC-USAS-L8i HBA (LSI 1068E) - IT mode (JBOD)
* Solaris 10 update 9 (09/10) OS
* Mix of SATA HDDs in four different ZFS raidz2's

I recently purchased a 3 TB drive (Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000) that I want to be able to use to its full capacity. However only 2 TB is recognized.

23. c1t29d0 <ATA-Hitachi HDS72303-A3B0-2.00TB>
/pci@0,0/pci8086,3410@9/pci15d9,a580@0/sd@1d,0

From research it looks like the culprit is the LSI 1068E chipset which does not support drives over 2 TB. Therefore I am looking at the AOC-USAS2-L8e card (SAS2008 chipset) which I believe should be supported by the mpt_sas module. "man mpt_sas" on my system suggests that it's there: The mpt_sas host bus adapter driver is a nexus driver that supports the LSI SAS200x/2108 series of chips...

It is my hope that I can simply replace the HBA, without changing anything else in my setup, and: (a) it will see all of my old zfs pools on existing drives, and (b) it will recognize the new 3 TB drive. [Note: I have no data on the 3 TB drive that I care about, so you can assume I will be reformatting it once its full capacity is recognized.]

Can anyone speculate or confirm whether this plan is likely to work? Thanks in advance!
 
I'll answer myself in case this will be of use.

The replacement of the 1068E to SAS2008 card went pretty much as expected. The major difference was that the device names in Solaris changed from something like "c1t8d0" to something like "c3t5000CCA369C267E0d0". Therefore my printout of which physical bay corresponds to which device in Solaris is no good anymore. However, it was easy to re-establish the mapping ... "dd if=/dev/rdsk/c3t5000CCA369C267E0d0s0 of=/dev/null" and look at which light comes on.

The replacement did not alter any of the partition tables. Not that I would expect it to, but it's something I checked. All zpools imported correctly.

The 3TB disk is recognized.

5. c3t5000CCA225C0F433d0 <ATA-Hitachi HDS72303-A3B0-2.73TB>

The only problem with regard to this replacement is that the 3TB drive doesn't initially show up in BIOS, but if you wait for several minutes it appears. This is intermittent. Link
 
Thanks for the info with your testing. Note though, that even using a sas2008 hba and a sata3 6Gb/s drive, you will not see that throughput benefit with the chassis you have due to the expander being a sas1/sata2 variety. The sas2/sata3 version would be SC846E16 - but please correct me if I'm off; supermicro has some weird ass part numbers.
 
You're correct - the throughput will still be limited by the expander. In fact the version of the case and expander I have (one generation behind: here) lists the older generation of cards. Looks like they've updated the case and this one has the SAS2 expander (and lists the AOC-USAS2-* cards).

In this case my reason for upgrade was to be able to use the full capacity of the 3TB disk... in the real world I've come nowhere near to 3 GB/s (and with a bunch of big SATA drives for a media center, I won't for the foreseeable future). But of course I can report that the newer HBA seems to work fine with the older expander.
 
Thanks for the post. I was considering 3TB...but have the "old" lsi cards so am stuck with 2TB limit....or new cards :)

re your earlier comment about it not showing up in the bios...I assume it boots into the o/s from cold ok?
 
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