[OpenIndiana-discuss] Opinions on LSI RAID vs. ZFS

[Edward Ned Harvey (openindiana)]

> From: Saso Kiselkov [mailto:skiselkov.ml at gmail.com]
> 
> > I find, with the motherboard built-in sas controller, you usually need to
> power off in order to swap a drive, and you need to "devfsadm -Cv" after
> coming up, in order to make the new drive available.
> 
> What kind of a messed up SAS controller would that be? I've yet to see
> this happen to me with any on-board SAS controller (in fact, all
> on-board SAS controllers that I've encountered so far were LSI chips,
> just placed on the motherboard instead on a plug-in board).

The on-board SAS controller isn't externally facing, and not expecting hotswap drives.  Drive detection is performed by BIOS during POST.  Dell optiplex, precision, and poweredge.  I have all 3 sitting in my basement right now, with SATA cables dangling out the chassis through holes I cut, in order to attach removable disks externally.  It all works but I have to power off the host while connecting/disconnecting drives.

The poweredge server also has an HBA (basic SAS) with hotswappable drives on the front.  These do not require any poweroff to swap the drives, as the name suggests.