ServeRAID M5110

[NAStard]

Hello,

After benchmarking my first FreeNAS deployment I am interested in buying a couple of controllers (and adding a few more spindles) to see how it improves performance.

Any reports of the IBM ServeRAID M5110 being incompatible with FreeNAS? Or should it just work?

I am wondering if the numerous references to IBM ServeRaid M1015 on the Interwebs has actually managed to push the price up, higher than it really should be. Hmmm...

Cheers!
:D

 

[SweetAndLow]

It's the card that is recommended all over the forum. Should be about $110 from eBay.

Edit: I can't read this isn't the card I thought it was.

 

[Bidule0hm]

Not sure if you misread but he talks about the M5110, not the M1015.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Not sure if you misread but he talks about the M5110, not the M1015.

Yep I read that wrong, I think the m5110 card won't work. Here is a thread of someone asking about a similar card with the lsi 2208 controller

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...id-m5110e-flash-to-it-mode.35654/#post-217556

 

[NAStard]

It's the card that is recommended all over the forum.

Well gosh, why didn't I think of reading all over the forum before reading the FAQ. ;)

After some research elsewhere on the Interwebs, I found this doc, IBM ServeRAID Adapter Quick Reference, which helped me get oriented with some IBM-branded SAS adapters. Perhaps it may be useful to others.

I eventually bought some M1115 controllers as those were the least expensive, today. Maybe tomorrow the price will be higher. :) I did not realize this before... but there may be over a dozen other online communities doing this NAS thing, jbod style, on various platforms, too. Now I am beginning to see why the price of these economy-class controllers is inching higher.

Cheers!
:D

 

[devnullius]

Shouldn't the IBM M5110 just work with FreeNAS? It's supported by FreeBSD 9.3 (https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=mfi&sektion=4#end) and it supports JBOD (https://lenovopress.com/tips0857 and https://lenovopress.com/tips0054-serveraid-quick-reference) and I saw one ebay advertisement comparing it to the LSI 9211 chipset... So... Are we really sure that it won't work? They look like affordable cards to have, including RAID5 (I know; ZFS does not want RAID) and DDR3 & PCI3...

Post-edit: Though https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...id-m5110e-flash-to-it-mode.35654/#post-217556 agrees - so what's going on here? Why is IBM's 5110's JBOD not good enough?

Let me know please :)

Devnullius