Re: HBA Adaptor advice

[Thomas Harold <thomas-lists@nybeta.com>]

On 5/19/2011 8:26 AM, Ed W wrote:
> Hi, following on from a recent thread, can folks with decent
> multi-port HBA adaptors please chime in with some model numbers of
> known decent adaptors please?
>
> The required use is to grow from currently 8 ish drives to perhaps
> 12-24 drives per machine. (It partitions out as: one or more RAID6
> arrays for data, plus a couple of backup drives)
>
> Ideally I would like a controller with writeback cache and BBU since
> whilst this office machine is likely quite underused, for any
> sensible amount of IO (some of the other machines we might upgrade)
> this seems to give a 10-100x increase in IOPs? For the moment it's
> just a nice to have though
>
> I only intend to use linux software raid, so any onboard raid
> functionality is just a liability. Budget is either low £100 ish for
> multi-port HBAs without cache, up to £1000 ish for 16-24 port high
> performance cache controllers:

I've been using a SuperMicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 (which is on your avoid 
list), which reports itself as:

class: SCSI
bus: PCI
detached: 0
driver: mvsas
desc: "Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MV64460/64461/64462 System 
Controller, Revision B"
vendorId: 11ab
deviceId: 6485
subVendorId: 15d9
subDeviceId: 0500

I've had it about 6 months at this point with SATA drives hooked up to 
it.  The issues that I've had with it dropping disks from the 6-disk 
RAID-10 array on CentOS 5.5 / 5.6 can probably be traced to:

Not using enterprise grade SATA disks (as the consumer brand takes too 
long to timeout on a bad seek, and mdadm dropped it from the array). 
Possibly combined with using a really inexpensive set of removable drive 
trays.  There were a lot of times after the weekly resync where the 
entire array went offline due to multiple drives being dropped.

Under normal operation it reads/writes to the disks fine and works fine 
as a controller.  Since this is my own personal server, I have not 
tested it with good SAS disks or enterprise SATAs and good drive 
enclosures.  I've since switched over to just hooking up a pair of RAID1 
arrays to it with a direct connect from the card to the drives (no 
removable trays), but I don't have enough time on the new setup to say 
that the problem is permanently fixed yet.

The card is inexpensive, which is a plus.  It's a PCIe x4 card.  I don't 
know whether it would be better behaved with a better class of disks / 
enclosures.

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