Guys GUYS! Seriously, calm down, it is a experimental topic we are talking about and not tested and I'm not willing to go that far with my array. Granted being able to utilize a RAID cache would be handy it is not necessary for my environment.
Besides, the attitudes and flaming that you guys were handing out to Jay is really disrespectful and unnecessary. Be adults, be human, there is no need to start trashing someone over what seems to be a miss understanding. Maybe Jay misunderstood, maybe you guys misunderstood, maybe you guys are talking about the exact same thing from different view points.
The point is that the attitudes that seemed to come across in your posts are not necessary. No one gets a chance to learn something new when being verbally assaulted, nor would they want to stick around to listen to the insults.
Discuss the experimental topic, don't trash each other just because you don't agree.
Anyhow.....
JayG30, thank you for posting and offering up the experimental idea. I would be willing to do some testing later but not on this system. I'm looking for stability and reliability.
Jay, to answer your questions earlier, yes I have a BPN-SAS-846A forward backplane and a BPN-826A rear backplane which I guess means I have the 847A model and it came with 5 AOC-SASLP-MV8 controllers which have a 2.2TB limit which is a problem as I'm wanting to run 4TB drives and future compatibility with larger capacity drives.
Many have said that the Dell H200, LSI 9207-8i, LSI 9211-8i and IBM M1015 are good card replacements as they can be flashed into IT mode so as to have direct raw access to the drives.
My question to them and anyone else that found this post was if I was looking at the LSI cards which would be best? the 9207 or the 9211. I read a post stating that the 9207 was newer than the 9211 which doesn't make sense to me and I was curious as to the differences as when I looked them up I didn't see any differences. But just because I didn't see them doesn't mean there aren't any.
On top of that knowing that I have 9 SAS cables that needing to be plugged in are there any other and/or better cards that would support more than 2 SFF8087 connectors.
I did see that you provided me with a link to the Intel RES2SV240. My question is, is there a performance difference between running 1 of these plus one other card vs running 5 cards. I would think that running 5 cards would give one a little more performance.
My other question would then be does this card support 3+TB drives.
I believe they do though I would like to know if anyone has confirmed this as of yet and I have looked at this card before though that was a few months ago and saw that BackBlase uses the same card in their pod builds.
These may seem like stupid questions but since I haven't delt with these cards and haven't spent days on end reading up on these cards and playing with various cards I don't know what card is better than the next. It does look like I'll be spending between 400 and 600 on replacement cards. Something I didn't expect but understand is necessary to connect all my available spaces and am ready to do so.
I also know some cards have been listed as good cards to use, then the question is are they good cards to use when you have 9 SFF8087 plugs to give homes to?
Yes I'm asking a lot of questions and I appoligize if I either seem ignorant or dumb but I'm trying to do what is best for this paticular setup and trying to learn a few new things.
For instance since starting this thread I've learned that some cards support IT mode. Something I didn't know prior. Something very handy for ZFS users