[OpenIndiana-discuss] [developer] HBA recommended except LSI and ARECA

[Fred Liu]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Keith Wesolowski [mailto:keith.wesolowski at joyent.com]
> Sent: 星期一, 五月 05, 2014 10:19
> To: Fred Liu
> Cc: Fred Liu; smartos-discuss at lists.smartos.org;
> developer at lists.illumos.org; Discussion list for OpenIndiana; OmniOS-
> discuss at lists.omniti.com
> Subject: Re: [developer] HBA recommended except LSI and ARECA
> 
> On Sun, May 04, 2014 at 02:42:54AM -0700, Fred Liu wrote:
> 
> >               I haven’t got a sas  drive to test. But the price delta
> between sas and sata drive under the same capacity is not small like
> USD30 at all. ☹.
> 
> I'll counter nebulous griping with hard data:
> 
> http://www.costcentral.com/proddetail/Hitachi_HGST_Ultrastar_7K4000_HUS
> 724030ALA640/0F14689/11841415/
> http://www.costcentral.com/proddetail/Hitachi_HGST_Ultrastar_7K4000_HUS
> 724030ALS640/0B26886/11904874/
> 
> Same device, same vendor, same capacity, different interface.  SAS
> premium, USD 23.  Buyers in bulk or with vendor relationships will pay
> less.

Yes. Like What Garrett said, this comparison is between *enterprise* SATA
and SAS drives. But I mean *consumer* SATA drives. So my statement should 
be changed to " the price delta between sas and laptop sata drive under the 
same capacity is not small like USD30 at all. ☹"

> SAS would be cheap at twice the price.  How much time have you wasted
> on SATA already, especially when I already warned you explicitly that
> there was a good chance SATA wouldn't work?  That's not to say you
> can't possibly make it work, but it's going to take a significant
> effort to figure out what's going wrong and fix it.  I can assure you
> that effort will cost you far more than SAS disks.

Just like what Bob mentioned, the current pmcs(7D) in illumos cannot work with 6H/7H
series of HBAs. Even replaced with SAS drives, the effort is still in vain.

Anyway, it looks like there is a very clear gap between commodity and enterprise market.
I definitely understand it is because of different business model. LSI and ADAPTEC are
enterprise-oriented. And so far I cannot find commodity-oriented(Marvell?) HBAs working in illumos. 
The on-board AHCI SATA interfaces are friends for individual/home users.