Confused about that LSI card? Join the crowd ...

[Barry]

Anyone know how to get the 9240's external LEDs to blink on disk activity in IT mode?

Thanks,
Barry

 

[Siggy]

Anyone have any experience running these cards on an ASRock C2750D4I Mini ITX motherboard? (This has an Intel Avoton C2750 Octa-Core Processor)

12 on-board sata ports already plus an additional 8 from the card would be just perfect for 2x 10 drive raidz2 arrays...

Thanks,
Sigg

 

[jgreco]

The onboard Marvell ports on the board might be problematic... it is hard to know.

 

[rf03]

I have a Penguin Computing 4736 with a 3ware 9750-8i controller. Unfortunately I can only configure 34 of 36 drives to be single raid devices. Is there any way to use the existing controller to see all of the drives or do I have to replace it with something like the 9211-8i?

 

[Ericloewe]

I have a Penguin Computing 4736 with a 3ware 9750-8i controller. Unfortunately I can only configure 34 of 36 drives to be single raid devices. Is there any way to use the existing controller to see all of the drives or do I have to replace it with something like the 9211-8i?

That is not an acceptable solution either way.

Get a proper HBA, like an LSI SAS 9211 or LSI SAS 9207 or crossflashed LSI SAS 9240/IBM M1015.

 

[jgreco]

I have a Penguin Computing 4736 with a 3ware 9750-8i controller. Unfortunately I can only configure 34 of 36 drives to be single raid devices. Is there any way to use the existing controller to see all of the drives or do I have to replace it with something like the 9211-8i?

This is a spectacularly bad idea for all the reasons outlined at the top of this thread. You'd be better off getting a 9211-8i.

 

[frishi]

Thanks so much for writing this up.
I wish I had read this earlier.

My Freenas box has:
Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O LGA 1155 Intel C204 Micro ATX Intel Xeon E3 Server Motherboard
16GB Kingston ECC RAM
A couple of WD Reds 4TB and a couple of WD Greens (mix of 1TB and 3TB)
Areca 1280ML Raid Controller with 2GB of onboard RAM
Norco 4220 with 20 hotswap bays 4U case

The Areca 1280ML with 6 SAS ports, which worked without issues until, taking a couple of TB of movies and TV shows with it.
My Freenas 9.3 was running absolutely flawlessly for about 83 days straight and then it started getting a lot of "camcontrol timeouted" messages and then suddenly wouldn't boot into Freenas.

I took it apart and moved the Areca controller to a different PCI slot.
After this , I was able to boot into Freenas and was told that 2 of my zpools were corrupted.
So I created them again and ran scrubs, and then read this thread.

I bought 2x IBM ServeRAID 1015 for my 10 HDDs
I plan on using 2 of these, but I don't know how many drives they will support before I run out of SAS ports.

 

[Ericloewe]

Thanks so much for writing this up.
I wish I had read this earlier.

My Freenas box has:
Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O LGA 1155 Intel C204 Micro ATX Intel Xeon E3 Server Motherboard
16GB Kingston ECC RAM
A couple of WD Reds 4TB and a couple of WD Greens (mix of 1TB and 3TB)
Areca 1280ML Raid Controller with 2GB of onboard RAM
Norco 4220 with 20 hotswap bays 4U case

The Areca 1280ML with 6 SAS ports, which worked without issues until, taking a couple of TB of movies and TV shows with it.
My Freenas 9.3 was running absolutely flawlessly for about 83 days straight and then it started getting a lot of "camcontrol timeouted" messages and then suddenly wouldn't boot into Freenas.

I took it apart and moved the Areca controller to a different PCI slot.
After this , I was able to boot into Freenas and was told that 2 of my zpools were corrupted.
So I created them again and ran scrubs, and then read this thread.

I bought 2x IBM ServeRAID 1015 for my 10 HDDs
I plan on using 2 of these, but I don't know how many drives they will support before I run out of SAS ports.

8 each. At least 32 each with expanders, probably closer to 128.

 

[cyberjock]

I have an Areca 1280ML-24. It was an amazing card in its day. Like you, I upgraded to 2GB of RAM. Great card for hardware RAID. Absolutely terrible idea for ZFS and FreeNAS. Glad you found this thread.

 

[frishi]

8 each. At least 32 each with expanders, probably closer to 128.

Thanks for the info.
My case has SAS backplanes, and there are 5 backplanes.
Each backplane has connectors for 4 HDDs.

So you are saying I should be able to connect 4 backplanes using 2 IBM ServerRAID cards
giving me 16 HDDs correct?

(sorry, I suffer from a math impediment)

 

[Ericloewe]

Thanks for the info.
My case has SAS backplanes, and there are 5 backplanes.
Each backplane has connectors for 4 HDDs.

So you are saying I should be able to connect 4 backplanes using 2 IBM ServerRAID cards
giving me 16 HDDs correct?

(sorry, I suffer from a math impediment)

Right.

 

[jgreco]

(sorry, I suffer from a math impediment)

At least you don't suffer from a SAS impediment.

 

[avalon60]

I found this on fleabay, and it says it has 8 ports, but I can only see 2, so where are the other 6.

Yes I know it's from China, but at a 3rd the price of what it is in the UK, I'm willing to go for it.

 

[jgreco]

You found /what/ on eBay?

 

[avalon60]

You found /what/ on eBay?

Ooops sorry, I didn't post the link.

It was this :
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-LSI-I...626?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item3f3b0e398a

 

[jgreco]

I found this on fleabay, and it says it has 8 ports, but I can only see 2, so where are the other 6.

Section 3: Cabling, look at "multilane".

And the red fanout cable below.

 

[avalon60]

Thanks for that. I am learning something every day :D

 

[Zserver]

Wow, I found an M1015 with high profile bracket for $75 at a local computer surplus store. Only one they had, too. Pieter's webpage (referenced from page 1 of this thread) has the flash program for win64 as well as the version for dos. Has anybody had a bad experience using the win64 flasher?

 

[jgreco]

They all work fine if they work fine, otherwise they don't. I know that sounds bad, but it is the reality. Do note that recent FreeNAS versions include sas2flash as a CLI utility.

 

[Zserver]

Actually, no, I was not aware of that. Well, with that ringing endorsement I think I'll take my chances with the win64 version, then. ;)

Thanks for the quick response.