Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2012 17:46:40 +0200 From: Moritz Wilhelmy <mw+fbsd@dennis.cs.uni-saarland.de> To: DarkSoul <darksoul@darkbsd.org> Cc: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Do you recommend Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 as PCI-X SATA controller? Message-ID: <20120404154639.GG18733@emile.cs.uni-saarland.de> In-Reply-To: <4F7C59D8.8080406@darkbsd.org> References: <20120404135238.GF18733@emile.cs.uni-saarland.de> <4F7C59D8.8080406@darkbsd.org>
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Hello, On Wed, Apr 04, 2012 at 23:25:28 +0900, DarkSoul wrote: > I used this card for my personal ZFS NAS (2 cards, 15 disks + 1 SSD). > > http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SAT2-MV8.cfm > > Frankly speaking, this card will work 99% of the time. But it has a few > quirks : > - Sometimes, I've had a port drop because maybe of a broken/dying disk. > The port would NOT recover unless I cold rebooted the server. > And a port not recovering means, even the BIOS option ROM programming > won't find it. > Quite annoying as one could guess. > - I could panic a system by removing a drive (back in the 8.1-RELEASE > days) because of thread locking/sleeping issues. > - I don't know what is to blame for that but : > - I had more than once odd queue issues and disks flapping. Not really > a problem with ZFS but VERY irritating nonetheless. > - I even had a whole controller drop on me once. Nothing a reboot/zpool > scrub couldn't fix (with NO corruption to boot!) but still... > - It really, REALLY doesn't play nice with other cards. I tried > migrating progressively to mpt(4) cards, with a one by one switch, only > to experience stray NMIs and pretty ugly kernel panics. It turned out > having a "pure" system with two f the same kind (mind, I was not pairing > PCI-X and PCIe, this was in every case pure PCI-X setups) did wonders > for stability. > > It's probably fairly decent for most home purposes (my main use), > but I'd advise against it in any serious environment. Can you (or someone else for that matter) recommend any decent PCI-X controller for use in "serious environments", preferably with more than 4 Ports and in the same price category? :-) The setup is rather serious, but then again, I don't expect having to replace disks all the time (so if there isn't anything else that would cost about the same, I might just go with this one)... It affects about 30 users. I heard Silicon Image cards are supposed to be good? I don't need or want a hardware RAID-controller, because I'd prefer using software RAID (and don't want to waste the extra money). Best regards, Moritz
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