[OpenIndiana-discuss] Can anyone recommend an external SATA card?

[Robin Axelsson]

The Areca cards are probably quite nice. They provide their own drivers 
for their cards and they support Solaris. It looks like their cards are 
based on Intel's IOP chipsets but it isn't revealed explicitly on their 
website. The only objection I have against their cards is the price. On 
for example Newegg, an Areca 1200 card goes for $160 and it gives you 
two SATA ports. An intel SASUC8I goes for $155 on Newegg providing 8 ports.

I also want to add to clarify; There was someone on this mailing lists 
who mentioned JBOD which is _not_ what you want to use if you intend to 
run ZFS on it. The preferred mode is IT mode which on LSI's controllers 
is done by flashing them with IT firmware. IT means Initiator-Target. 
The disks should be run either as RAID0 with one disk per stripe or as 
"Single Disk", (different vendors have different names for the same 
thing), not JBOD which is a different thing.

On 2011-01-21 11:36, trevor robinson wrote:
>    If it's helpful we use (or did anyway, since an advantage of ZFS is avoiding using proprietary RAID cards !) Areca, we have a test machine running OI_148 using an Areca ARC1200 (PCIe x1).
>
> Trev
>
> --- On Thu, 1/20/11, Robin Axelsson<gu99roax at student.chalmers.se>  wrote:
>
> From: Robin Axelsson<gu99roax at student.chalmers.se>
> Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Can anyone recommend an external SATA card?
> To: openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> Date: Thursday, January 20, 2011, 11:50 PM
>
> When it comes to Marvells chips it some of them work on OSOL/OI and some
> of them don't. Look into the OpenSolaris HCL, if it
> signed/certified/native than it's fine but if it merely says "reported
> to work" I would be careful about it. I would not recommend anyone using
> JMicron controller chips as I have had tons of problems with them on
> several different motherboards. There are drivers for them in OSOL/OI
> but they are nothing but trouble.
>
>
> On 2011-01-20 23:09, Michelle Knight wrote:
>> Hi Willard,
>>
>> Thank you for those links. I've had a look through and it is interesting that
>> the cheaper cards are Marvell, though based on .
>>
>> The card I've got problems with is based on the Marvell 9128 chipset.
>>
>> Do you think I could run in to trouble?
>>
>> Michelle.
>>
>> On Thursday 20 January 2011 21:36:50 Willard Korfhage wrote:
>>> Here are some references to good cards:
>>>
>>>     From 16 to 2 ports: Ideal SATA/SAS Controllers for ZFS&   Linux MD RAID
>>> http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=10
>>>
>>> Some discussion that followed the blog posting
>>> http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=480925
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org
>>> http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
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>
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