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

[Edward Ned Harvey (openindiana)]

> From: Joshua M. Clulow [mailto:josh at sysmgr.org]
> 
> This is emphatically false.  Though the pestilence of cfgadm(1M) and
> the idea that device replacement is somehow advantageously manual had
> persisted inside Sun's walls until its untimely demise, SunOS itself
> is certainly capable of hot-plugging devices.
> 
> If you have a SAS controller attached via the mpt_sas driver, for
> instance, you can absolutely expect hot plugged disks to go away and
> return automatically.  If not, then you are experiencing bugs in the
> system and should report them as such so that we can fix them.
> 
> SATA disks attached to SATA controllers supported through the sata
> framework are something of a special case.  There is a tuneable that
> prevents SATA hot plug from working, which is unfortunately enabled by
> default -- again due to history and the misguided manual configuration
> crowd.  You can enable it in /etc/system, though.  The variable in
> question is "sata_auto_online", visible (with comment) here:

The system I just tested on is a Dell Precision workstation, and it uses sata.so.1.  I mostly mention that, because others here have mentioned assuming the use of mpt_sas, which is different, and uses some variation of " -x remove_device" instead of "-c disconnect"

The following procedure worked for me:
        export EXTERNALDISK=c3t4d0
        export SATAPORT=`sudo cfgadm -al | grep $EXTERNALDISK | sed 's/:.*//'` ; echo "" ; echo "EXTERNALDISK is: $EXTERNALDISK" ; echo "SATAPORT is: $SATAPORT" ; echo ""

        # Result:
        # EXTERNALDISK is: c3t4d0
        # SATAPORT is: sata0/4

        sudo cfgadm -y -c unconfigure $SATAPORT
        sudo cfgadm -y -c disconnect $SATAPORT

    Now it is safe to disconnect your drive, and connect a new drive in its place.

    After new drive is connected, do this:
        sudo cfgadm -y -c connect $SATAPORT
        sudo cfgadm -y -c configure $SATAPORT
        sudo devfsadm -Cv

As Josh describes, perhaps the unconfigure/disconnect/connect/configure can be skipped, by tuning sata_auto_online.  But as far as I'm concerned, the present result is good enough.  I don't care to bother testing sata_auto_online.