[OpenIndiana-discuss] An interesting experience with sata drives on an HBA

[Rich]

The 830 has a known problem where all the drives report the same WWN. So if
you put them in the same SAS topology...

- Rich


On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 11:29 AM, Dan Swartzendruber <dswartz at druber.com>wrote:

>
> I have an M1015 (rebadged LSI HBA with two 8087 connectors.)  One of them
> connects to a 3.5" jbod chassis with 4 SAS nearline drives (tank pool.)  I
> also have two samsung 830 SSD (sata) connected to the 2nd port on the HBA
> with a forward breakout cable.  Works just fine.  Apparently some SATA
> drives (WD blues at least) *do* seem to have a WWN assigned.  Others (like
> the SSDs) don't - I infer the HBA fakes up WWNs for them.  So I spent
> several hours trying to salvage my virtualized OI install to move it to the
> bare-metal server.  The first hurdle was a hang at boot.  Booting with
> '-kv' showed the last message being 'audio0 is /pseudo/audio0' and nothing
> after that.  I did try 'touch /reconfigure' via the live CD but that didn't
> help.  Not sure what else to do, and google was not real helpful.  I really
> hoped OI wouldn't be as finicky as windows, but alas :( I decided to do a
> fresh install and fix up stuff later.  So I do a live CD install to get the
> GUI desktop so I can run virtualbox.  Comes up just fine, except one of the
> two SSDs shows as faulted.  After much experimentation (and I apologize
> that I forgot to save output from the format command - it was 1:30AM by
> that point and I was exhausted.)  Anyway, here is the output from the
> virtualized system (back to that now):
>
>        4. c5t5000C50041BD3E85d0 <SEAGATE-ST1000NM0001-0002-**931.51GB>
>           /pci at 0,0/pci15ad,7a0 at 15/**pci1000,3040 at 0/iport at f/disk@**
> w5000c50041bd3e85,0
>        5. c5t5000C50041BD703Dd0 <SEAGATE-ST1000NM0001-0002-**931.51GB>
>           /pci at 0,0/pci15ad,7a0 at 15/**pci1000,3040 at 0/iport at f/disk@**
> w5000c50041bd703d,0
>
> Note the '@w5000xxxxxxxx' stuff?  In my fail case, it was like
> 'c65000xxxxxxx' and 'c75000xxxxxxxxx' because the two SSDs were on
> different SATA connectors of the breakout cable.  Here is the gotcha
> though: the part *after* the 'c6' or 'c7' was identical!  And it was
> identical because the part after the '@w5000' was identical!  I can only
> infer this is some kind of glitch with the HBA where it got confused and
> assigned duplicate WWN for the two SATA SSDs, and this led OI to think they
> were in fact the same device, so trying to add the 2nd SSD to the pool
> would get a message that it is already in the pool.  Confused the heck out
> of me until I noticed they were duplicates :)  Even if I could jigger the
> HBA into 'fixing' this, no guarantee it wouldn't bork later.  For now, I
> put the two SSDs on motherboard sata ports, so they get the canonical
> cXtYdZ.  It's odd that OI seemed to think they were the same device, but
> different.  Hmmmm...
>
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