Confused about that LSI card? Join the crowd ...

[pbucher]

I had a fake board at one point, I was lucky and was able to return it to the vendor on ebay. It looked like the real thing but it was so unstable the system couldn't even boot with it installed half the time. Much less actually accessing a drive attached to it. The give away that it was fake was that it came with a driver CD that wasn't even a good replica of the factory one and the traces on the board where not the same quality of a real board. Outside of that it looked like the real thing.

 

[DoulosGeek]

I just bought an HP DL180/G6. 14x 1TB drives on a P410. Oops. I set the drives up as 14 RAID0 devices. Dang it...not a good configuration after reading through pages and pages here.

QUESTION: Will a IBM 1015 or any other board allow me to attach and use all 14 drives (using the on board SATA backplane) in JBOD/IT mode?

 

[jgreco]

Quite possibly, but without seeing the unit, it is hard to know.

http://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/HP-DL180-G6-Internal-View.jpg

It looks like SFF8087 to the controller, so if you can find a suitable alternative controller, my guess would be yes.

 

[DoulosGeek]

Here...to go hand in hand with the image from ServeTheHome.com...I shot a quick and dirty phone video clip...

View: http://youtu.be/r9ITw7Rp21o


I suppose I can just buy one and "see if it works"...but I don't want to waste time and money.

 

[pbucher]

I suppose I can just buy one and "see if it works"...but I don't want to waste time and money.

Looking at your video it looks like your should have no problem swapping the HP card for an LSI one. I'm guessing it is probably a 4 channel SAS cable from the look of the connectors and cable, I've got 35 drives hanging off of a 4 channel SAS cable without a problem.

Assuming this is a 6Gbs SAS setup you can move (4*6Gbs/8) 3 Gigabytes per second of data per second(over course there is overhead & latency and such which will result in much slower speeds) which is plenty of bandwidth for 14 drives.

 

[DoulosGeek]

Yes! It worked! The m1015 arrived today, I crossflashed it to IT mode and it sees all 14 drives.

 

[pbucher]

Yes! It worked! The m1015 arrived today, I crossflashed it to IT mode and it sees all 14 drives.

That's great. Now just do some investigation on how to structure your pool & disks. Hint: don't just put all 14 drives in a single zraid volume.

 

[DoulosGeek]

Suggestions? OK...suggestions where to best start figuring this out? It would not accept all 14 into one ZFS. It would only take 11.

 

[pbucher]

You need to do some reading on making ZFS pools.....Trying this link as a starting point. The main thing is to determine if you want a array of mirrored pairs(sort of like RAID 10) or you want to use RAIDZ with 1, 2, or 3 redundant drives.

ZFS is a different beast then traditional RAID but I think you will like it once you spend some time with it. Just be very careful when adding to your pool, there is no undo or removal, so if you have this great 100TB pool made up of multiple RAIDZ volumes and you accidentally add your dying SATA scratch disk to it, you are screwed and need to backup all the data on it, delete the whole thing and recreate it.

 

[tmacka88]

PROBLEM: While I was flashing the M1015 to IT mode, during the process I got an error message "Failed to initialize PAL".

SOLUTION: I used a different computer to perform the flash without issue. Once the M1015 was flashed to IT mode, I was able to place the card back into the intended machine and use it with out issue.

A quick search of the web turned up the same results for others during the flash process. The error seems to manifest on certain Intel chipsets. That made sense due to the fact I was attempting to flash the controller with Supermicro X9SCM-F with an Intel chipset, which resulted in the error. I ended up successfully flashing the M1015 in a Dell inspiron. I am surprised it worked because getting %#ck^d over by Dell machines seems to be the status quo for me lately.

Do you think using a AMD APU will still work when cross flashing?

Thanks

 

[jgreco]

Most problems seem to be related to Intel somethingorother. I don't recall hearing problems with AMD boards.

 

[tmacka88]

Most problems seem to be related to Intel somethingorother. I don't recall hearing problems with AMD boards.

Ok great. I will try it on a AMD and let you guys know. Thanks for the quick reply.

also when creating a DOS bootable flash drive to load the files onto it for cross-flashing would this tute work?
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/46707-ms-dos-bootable-flash-drive-create.html

I dont use windows (for a long time) so have to use a friends system to make it am want to make sure this will work before I go over to do so.

Also what files do I need to point the DOS bootable drive to within the sas2008 folder. I want to convert my M1015 to a LSI9211-IT mode.

Thanks again.

 

[tmacka88]

or do i point the DOS boot disk to the whole folder (sas2008)?

 

[jgreco]

Don't know. I do know the HP Drive Key Utility works though.

 

[tmacka88]

I think it worked. first 2 steps worked on my AMD PC but then got a ERROR: PAL or something. So tranfered it to my Intel PC ASUS P5G41T-MLX LGA 775 Mother Board
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6550 @ 2.33GHz

 

[pbucher]

I think it worked. first 2 steps worked on my AMD PC but then got a ERROR: PAL or something. So tranfered it to my Intel PC ASUS P5G41T-MLX LGA 775 Mother Board
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6550 @ 2.33GHz

Most problems with flashing are the LSI DOS utilities don't work real well(if at all) on a system with modern EFI firmware. LSI makes a flash utility that runs under EFI but you need to know how to find your way around in the EFI shell(in other words just find a old box with standard BIOS in it and use the LSI DOS/Windows flash program unless you have a few hours for some learning).

 

[tmacka88]

Most problems with flashing are the LSI DOS utilities don't work real well(if at all) on a system with modern EFI firmware. LSI makes a flash utility that runs under EFI but you need to know how to find your way around in the EFI shell(in other words just find a old box with standard BIOS in it and use the LSI DOS/Windows flash program unless you have a few hours for some learning).

that must have been why it worked on my intel system as it is older than my amd by a couple of years.

would be good if someone could make a video tute explaining how get around as you stated for noobs like me. I was just lucky it worked in my second PC.

 

[Fermin Rodriguez]

question. i might have misunderstood but, i can use 2 m1015 cards. to connect 12 hard drives and use all 12 in a single zfs array?
if not, can you recomend a low profile expander that i can user? my backplane has 3 plugs, and the m1015 only has 2.

 

[pbucher]

question. i might have misunderstood but, i can use 2 m1015 cards. to connect 12 hard drives and use all 12 in a single zfs array?
if not, can you recomend a low profile expander that i can user? my backplane has 3 plugs, and the m1015 only has 2.

You are good with 2 cards and hooking up 12 drives them. The interface bandwidth certainly won't be your bottleneck. You will want to probably break the 12 drives into smaller raidz arrays, a very nice combo would be 6 drives off each card in a raid2z config of 2 drives. You would loose 4 drives to parity but it would give you the best setup with 12 drives. To be clear you'd have a single ZFS pool with 2 raid2z arrays in it.

 

[Fermin Rodriguez]

care to explain why would loosing 4 drives will be "the best setup"