Re: potentially lost largeish raid5 array..

On September 23, 2011, Stan Hoeppner wrote:

On 9/23/2011 12:10 AM, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:

quoted

I /really really/ wish the driver for this card was more stable, but you
deal with what you've got (in my case a $100 2 port SAS/8 port SATA
card).

Please don't shield the identity of the problem card.  Others need to
know of your problems.  An educated guess tells me it is one of...

Card:    SuperMicro AOC-SASLP-MV8            Marvell 88SE6480
Driver:  MVSAS

*DING**DING**DING**DING**DING*

We have a winner! It's a very nice card when it works.

Card:    HighPoint RocketRAID 2680/2680SGL   Marvell 88SE6485
Driver:  MVSAS

This ASIC/driver combo is so historically horrible with Linux that I'm
surprised all the owners haven't had a big bon fire party and thrown all
the cards in.  Or simply Ebay'd them to Windows users, where they seem
to work relatively OK.

Solve your problem with a 50% more $$ LSI SAS1068E based Intel 8 port
PCIe x4 SAS/SATA HBA, which uses the mptsas driver:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816117157

It seems this is the card most users switch to after being burned by the
cheap Marvell based SAS 2xSFF8087 cards.  The 1068E cards and the mptsas
driver are far more reliable, stable, and faster.  Many OEM cards from
IBM, Dell, etc, use this chip and can be had on Ebay for less than the
new retail Intel card.  In your situation I'd probably buy new Intel
just in case.  Hope this info/insight helps.

I'd love to switch, but I didn't really have the money for the card then, and 
now I have less money. I suppose if I ebayed this card first, and then bought a 
new one that would work out, but yeah, It will have to wait a bit (things are 
VERY tight right now).

So this Intel card, looks like a good option, but how much faster is it? I get 
500MB/s read off this SASLP. Probably a bit more now that there's 7 drives in 
the array. Off of XFS, it gets at least 200MB/s read (the discrepancy between 
raw and over xfs really bugs me, something there can't be right can it?).

Thank you for the suggestion though, I will have to book mark that link.

-- 
Thomas Fjellstrom
tfjellstrom@shaw.ca