Mixed controllers on JBOD Raid 6?

Mixed controllers on JBOD Raid 6?

[Another Sillyname]

I'm looking at an Asus Maximus Vii Gene motherboard which has 8 SATA
controller connectors.....6 Intel and 2 other (can't remember at the
moment).

Are there any projected issues or concerns about making a 8 Drive
RAID6 array where I'm using mixed controllers?

TIA

Tony

Re: Mixed controllers on JBOD Raid 6?

[Roger Heflin]

I have done it several times.

The only concern is that some of the non-intel and non-amd supplied
cheaper SATA chipset are crap, so carefully read about any issues
around the 2nd controller.

I have an Gigabyte FM2 board (8 build-in AMD supplied SATA ports) + 4
PCI Sil SATA ports (slow but stable).

I had serious issues with a marvell supplied PCIE controller (crashed
on some IO + smartctl commands).    A VIA chipset (ASUS build-into MB
vintage 2006) that would crash under heavy usage.    And read a number
of issues around other PCIE cards enough to make me stay away of the
cheap( add-on card/add-on MB ports).

On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 1:27 PM, Another Sillyname
<anothersname@googlemail.com> wrote:
> I'm looking at an Asus Maximus Vii Gene motherboard which has 8 SATA
> controller connectors.....6 Intel and 2 other (can't remember at the
> moment).
>
> Are there any projected issues or concerns about making a 8 Drive
> RAID6 array where I'm using mixed controllers?
>
> TIA
>
> Tony
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

Re: Mixed controllers on JBOD Raid 6?

[Roman Mamedov]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1276 bytes --]

On Wed, 1 Jul 2015 19:27:11 +0100
Another Sillyname <anothersname@googlemail.com> wrote:

> I'm looking at an Asus Maximus Vii Gene motherboard which has 8 SATA
> controller connectors.....6 Intel and 2 other (can't remember at the
> moment).
> 
> Are there any projected issues or concerns about making a 8 Drive
> RAID6 array where I'm using mixed controllers?

Mixing controllers in general -- no issue whatsoever, that's the beauty of the
(Linux) software RAID.

In cases like yours, there could be a minor performance hit if the additional
2-port controller gets fed only a single-lane of PCI-E 1.0. If so, this will
cap the total throughput of both ports combined to less than 250 MB/sec.

However on the motherboard that you specified that controller is ASMedia
ASM1061 which supports PCI-E 1x 2.0. And if the chipset really provides a 2.0
port to it (not an expert in Intel chipsets, check the datasheets), then the
cap would be 500 MB/sec, which should be more than enough for two regular
spinning hard drives.

In any case, typically with RAID6 setups like these getting the highest
possible sequential read/write performance isn't on top of the priorities
list, so the above may not even be a concern for you.

-- 
With respect,
Roman

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 198 bytes --]

Re: Mixed controllers on JBOD Raid 6?

[John Stoffel]

Another> I'm looking at an Asus Maximus Vii Gene motherboard which has
Another> 8 SATA controller connectors.....6 Intel and 2 other (can't
Another> remember at the moment).

Another> Are there any projected issues or concerns about making a 8
Another> Drive RAID6 array where I'm using mixed controllers?

I tried using this for a while, but once I ran out of ports as I added
drives, I ended up getting:

02:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon] (rev 03)

And putting that into my system and hanging most, if not all of my
data drives off that sucker.  I did this so that my RAID1 boot volumes
wouldn't move around and get mixed up, and also so that I got more
channels and stayed away from semi-crappy (maybe all crappy) dual/quad
port SATA SIL chips.  I forget the exact brands.

But in any case, if you can, I'd recommended that dedicated card, or a
pair of them, so that you get nice fast speed, and the warm fuzzy
feeling that your boot drives won't wander around in boot order
detection much.

John