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

[Christopher Chan]

On Wednesday, October 09, 2013 03:01 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (openindiana) 
wrote:
>> 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.
>
Er...isn't hotswap capability PART of the specs whether the drives are 
SAS or SATA? I can do this on a cheap desktop motherboard but you cannot 
on a server board with getting a HBA?