[OpenIndiana-discuss] General ZFS questions (Michelle Knight)

[Robin Axelsson]

Oh, I meant

S26361-F3257-L8

There are also HBAs with external SFF-8088 connectors. Unless you find something cheap on eBay they can be considerably more expensive than the HBAs with internal connectors. 3Ware has LSI based cards in their product line that use SATA connectors directly on the board, some of them are likely to have ESATA but last time I checked they were not very cheap. Here is a list of HBAs with external ports that are LSI based:

External
LSI SAS3401E-R
LSI SAS3801E-R
(you can also check out LSI's SAS 9200 series cards if you want SAS/SATA6.0)
Dell Perc 5e
Dell Perc 6e (can they be flashed to IT?)*
**  <http://www.kastl-gmbh.de/product_info.php?info=p7910_RAID-Ctrl-SAS-6G-0-1--D2607--S26361-F3554-L8.html>*Fujitsu-Siemens S26361-F3554-L8 (SAS/SATA 6.0)
Fujitsu-Siemens S26361-F3890-L13 (SAS/SATA 3.0)
HP SC08Ge (exactly the same card as the LSI SAS3801E-R but rebranded)

External&  Internal (combo)
LSI SAS3442E-R
HP SC44Ge (same card as the LSI SAS3442E-R but rebranded)

A more thorough list of Fujitsu-Siemens cards (most of them are based on LSI hardware) can be found here:

http://www.kastl-gmbh.de/index.php?cat=c15_SCSI-RAID-SAS-Controller.html&page=2

Supermicro has a few cheaper LSI cards too;

http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/storage_cards.cfm

it might be worth checking them out too. A problem with some of these cards is that the components are on the opposite side of a normal PCIe cards and the bracket is not correctly aligned. They are pin-compatible PCIe ports but they don't fit the slot unless you make some adjustments. Thes cards are called UIO cards and have a slightly different form-factor than standard PCIe cards. Also be sure that it is a PCIe card you are looking at and not a PCI-X card. Also make sure you run these controllers in IT-mode (initiator-target which disables all hw raid functionality). Most LSI cards can.


Otherwise it could be a good idea to just connect an E-SATA bracket to 
one of the internal connectors of the HBA.

If you don't want LSI you could also check the Intel IOP333 and IOP343 
as I believe that they also have native support in Solaris. I don't know 
about the IOP348. Just because one controller works it doesn't mean that 
another does even though it is from the same vendor. Marvell is a good 
example of that.

I spent a lot of time researching this a year ago when I was about to 
build an OSOL based NAS so I figured I could share what I have found out.

On 2011-01-13 20:29, Michelle Knight wrote:
> Thanks,
>
> Some of those are blistering cards, but the ones I've found are internal only.
> I'm after two e-sata ports.
>
>> You could also look at S26361-F3257-L4 or S26361-F3257-L4 which is from
> Are my eyes suffering with age, or are those two numbers the same :-)
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