Dell/LSI RAID controllers

[sporkman]

Hello all,

I'm considering a Dell, specifically the Poweredge 2970, and I'm not
finding much info on their site about the various raid controller options
- there don't seem to be any actual specs.

Anyone here familiar with the various models (PERC 5i, PERC 6I, SAS 6/iR)
and what FBSD driver each one uses?  All are within my price range.  I
assume all can handle SATA as well as SAS, correct?  Is performance in the
ballpark of a $500 3Ware or Areca card?

Thanks,

Charles


___
Charles Sprickman
NetEng/SysAdmin
Bway.net - New York's Best Internet - www.bway.net
spork@... - 212.655.9344

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[Damian McGuckin]

On Thu, 24 Sep 2009, Charles Sprickman wrote:

> Anyone here familiar with the various models (PERC 5i,

These are the same family as the LSI Logic MegaRAID SAS 83XXxxx.

I think they use the 'mfi' driver.

> PERC 6I, SAS 6/iR) and what FBSD driver each one uses?

> All are within my price range.  I assume all can handle SATA as well as
> SAS, correct?  Is performance in the ballpark of a $500 3Ware or Areca
> card?

I would personally stick with the Areca. The newer ones of these now
handle both SAS and SATA.

- Damian

Pacific Engineering Systems International, 277-279 Broadway, Broadway NSW 2007
Ph:[phone] .. Fx:[phone] | unsolicited email not wanted here !
Views and opinions here are mine and not those of any past or present employer
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[Daniel Braniss-2]

> Hello all,
>
> I'm considering a Dell, specifically the Poweredge 2970, and I'm not
> finding much info on their site about the various raid controller options
> - there don't seem to be any actual specs.
>
> Anyone here familiar with the various models (PERC 5i, PERC 6I, SAS 6/iR)
> and what FBSD driver each one uses?  All are within my price range.  I
> assume all can handle SATA as well as SAS, correct?  Is performance in the
> ballpark of a $500 3Ware or Areca card?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Charles

We have a couple of them, no complains. The raid is doing fine, though
megacli is too primitive. We are running raid 5 and zfs on top and
the throughput is comparable to our NetAPP filer (without all the bells
and whistles).

Copyright (c) 1992-2009 The FreeBSD Project.
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        The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation.
FreeBSD 7.2-STABLE #33: Thu Jul  2 16:11:01 IDT 2009
    danny@sunfire:/r+d/obj/sunfire/r+d/7/sys/HUJI
module_register: module pci/igb already exists!
Module pci/igb failed to register: 17
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5410  @ 2.33GHz (2329.84-MHz K8-class CPU)
  Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x10676  Stepping = 6
  Features=0xbfebfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,
CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE>
  Features2=0xce3bd<SSE3,DTES64,MON,DS_CPL,VMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,DCA
,SSE4.1>
  AMD Features=0x20100800<SYSCALL,NX,LM>
  AMD Features2=0x1<LAHF>
  TSC: P-state invariant
  Cores per package: 4
usable memory = 8568651776 (8171 MB)
avail memory  = 8267067392 (7884 MB)
ACPI APIC Table: <DELL   PE_SC3  >
FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 4 CPUs
...
mfi0: <Dell PERC 6> port 0xec00-0xecff mem 0xfc980000-0xfc9bffff,0xfc940000-0xf
c97ffff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci1
mfi0: Megaraid SAS driver Ver 3.00
mfi0: [ITHREAD]
pcib8: <ACPI PCI-PCI bridge> at device 4.0 on pci0
pci10: <ACPI PCI bus> on pcib8
mfi1: <Dell PERC 6> port 0xdc00-0xdcff mem 0xfc780000-0xfc7bffff,0xfc740000-0xf
c77ffff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci10
mfi1: Megaraid SAS driver Ver 3.00
...

danny



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[Scott Long-2]

On Sep 23, 2009, at 11:12 PM, Charles Sprickman wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I'm considering a Dell, specifically the Poweredge 2970, and I'm not  
> finding much info on their site about the various raid controller  
> options - there don't seem to be any actual specs.
>
> Anyone here familiar with the various models (PERC 5i, PERC 6I, SAS  
> 6/iR) and what FBSD driver each one uses?  All are within my price  
> range.  I assume all can handle SATA as well as SAS, correct?  Is  
> performance in the ballpark of a $500 3Ware or Areca card?
>
> Thanks,
>

Dell hardware works well and is well supported.  SAS5/6 means that  
it's a SAS+SATA controller that does basic RAID0 and RAID1.  PERC5/6  
means that it's a full-fledged caching RAID controller.  There is even  
a management tool for both the SAS5/6 and PERC5/6 controllers.

Scott

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[Andrew Snow-2]

On Sep 23, 2009, at 11:12 PM, Charles Sprickman wrote:

> (PERC 5i, PERC 6I, SAS 6/iR)

When I tried the perc 5i last year, it worked, but was slow (write
caching was disabled and there was no way to enable it) and there was no
reporting of errors or raid degradation.

- Andrew
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[sporkman]

On Thu, 24 Sep 2009, Damian McGuckin wrote:

>> All are within my price range.  I assume all can handle SATA as well as
>> SAS, correct?  Is performance in the ballpark of a $500 3Ware or Areca
>> card?
>
> I would personally stick with the Areca. The newer ones of these now handle
> both SAS and SATA.

I am considering that, but I'm concerned about whether this would entail
trying to hack something together to get the drives connected to the card
- I have no idea how proprietary things are in there.  It's been awhile,
but last time I put together a box with a ton of SATA drives, it seemed
every manufacturer had their own connector scheme for "multilane" SATA.  I
suspect I couldn't just drop a 3rd party card in there and plug it into
the backplane.

Still digging for a clear picture of the inside of the thing.

Thanks,

Charles

> - Damian
>
> Pacific Engineering Systems International, 277-279 Broadway, Broadway NSW
> 2007
> Ph:[phone] .. Fx:[phone] | unsolicited email not wanted here
> !
> Views and opinions here are mine and not those of any past or present
> employer
>
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[sporkman]

On Thu, 24 Sep 2009, Scott Long wrote:

> On Sep 23, 2009, at 11:12 PM, Charles Sprickman wrote:
>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I'm considering a Dell, specifically the Poweredge 2970, and I'm not
>> finding much info on their site about the various raid controller options -
>> there don't seem to be any actual specs.
>>
>> Anyone here familiar with the various models (PERC 5i, PERC 6I, SAS 6/iR)
>> and what FBSD driver each one uses?  All are within my price range.  I
>> assume all can handle SATA as well as SAS, correct?  Is performance in the
>> ballpark of a $500 3Ware or Areca card?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>
> Dell hardware works well and is well supported.

That's good to know.  Before I hit the Dell site, I was looking at
barebones Supermicro servers (and some others) and Dell beat the "build it
yourself" price by a wide margin.  Currently there's a $460 discount on
the 2970.

> SAS5/6 means that it's a SAS+SATA controller that does basic RAID0 and
> RAID1.  PERC5/6 means that it's a full-fledged caching RAID controller.
> There is even a management tool for both the SAS5/6 and PERC5/6
> controllers.

Does Dell bother documenting this stuff anywhere?  I find their website
barely usable (both in terms of response time - awful and organization -
also awful).

Does the SAS6 do mirror+stripe?  Is the management tool something that
requires the whole boatload of Linux compat stuff or is it something
simple like "mptutil"?

Lastly, I see the PERC6 is about $300 beyond the "integrated" SAS6ir.
What more does the PERC version offer?  Google is showing me some people
calling the non-PERC "quasi-raid" which worries me...

Thanks,

Charles

> Scott
>
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[Peter C. Lai-2]

On 2009-09-25 10:58:18PM -0400, Charles Sprickman wrote:

> On Thu, 24 Sep 2009, Scott Long wrote:
>
>> On Sep 23, 2009, at 11:12 PM, Charles Sprickman wrote:
>>
>>> Hello all,
>>>
>>> I'm considering a Dell, specifically the Poweredge 2970, and I'm not
>>> finding much info on their site about the various raid controller options
>>> - there don't seem to be any actual specs.
>>>
>>> Anyone here familiar with the various models (PERC 5i, PERC 6I, SAS 6/iR)
>>> and what FBSD driver each one uses?  All are within my price range.  I
>>> assume all can handle SATA as well as SAS, correct?  Is performance in
>>> the ballpark of a $500 3Ware or Areca card?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>
>> Dell hardware works well and is well supported.
>
> That's good to know.  Before I hit the Dell site, I was looking at
> barebones Supermicro servers (and some others) and Dell beat the "build it
> yourself" price by a wide margin.  Currently there's a $460 discount on the
> 2970.
>
>> SAS5/6 means that it's a SAS+SATA controller that does basic RAID0 and
>> RAID1.  PERC5/6 means that it's a full-fledged caching RAID controller.
>> There is even a management tool for both the SAS5/6 and PERC5/6
>> controllers.
>
> Does Dell bother documenting this stuff anywhere?  I find their website
> barely usable (both in terms of response time - awful and organization -
> also awful).

You are probably going to have to get used to resorting to mapping Dell's
Linux side of the house to what you know about FreeBSD (as the latter will
never be officially supported, even though you will probably find some
sympathetic Dell engineers on the mailing lists who do contribute to the
project).

So I would start at http://linux.dell.com/storage.shtml as well
as getting on the mailing lists.

>
> Does the SAS6 do mirror+stripe?  Is the management tool something that
> requires the whole boatload of Linux compat stuff or is it something simple
> like "mptutil"?

Probably not both at the same time (i.e. RAID1+0/RAID0+1).

>
> Lastly, I see the PERC6 is about $300 beyond the "integrated" SAS6ir. What
> more does the PERC version offer?  Google is showing me some people calling
> the non-PERC "quasi-raid" which worries me...

It's quasi in the Intel Matrix sense.

--
===========================================================
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