[OpenIndiana-discuss] SATA Expansion cards

[David Scharbach]

I used the RES2SV240 card in OI for a while with no issues.  It is a standard LSI based LSISAS2x expander chip.  Use it now in FreeNAS and the 9211-8i card functions fine with SATA drives.  I currently have 20 SATA drives connected to it with no issues while running IT firmware and ZFS.

I have also tried a SATA expansion card and it sucked.  There is a big difference between a proper SAS expander like the RES2SV240 and cheap SATA expanders.

I have never plugged and expander into an expander though :)  This should be possible but I have never had the need to do so.

Cheers,

> On Feb 1, 2015, at 1:49 PM, Andrew Gabriel <illumos at cucumber.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> cjt wrote:
>> On 01/31/2015 06:45 PM, Jerry Kemp wrote:
>>> I thought that SATA expansion cards were always bad news when used with
>>> Solaris, and Solaris based distro's.
>>> 
>>> There are tons of horror stories out there, primarily thru the ZFS
>>> mailing list.
>>> 
>>> Has this changed?
>>> 
>>> Are there end users out there using SATA expansion cards with
>>> OpenIndiana, Solaris, etc. with positive and reliable results?
>>> 
>>> Jerry 
>> 
>> FWIW, I have a server doing video streaming that has a multitude of Intel RES2SV240 expanders hanging off of LSI controllers, and have not experienced problems except when I first configured it and tried to have multiple layers of expander.  I don't recall what exactly the problem was (it was quite a while ago), but I no longer try to hang expanders off of other expanders.
> 
> SAS or SATA drives?
> The problems are with the poor implementations of SATA Tunneling Protocol in the SAS expanders, so it only impacts SATA drives, not SAS drives.
> 
> Having said that, I haven't heard of anyone using RES2SV240 before - do you know if it uses standard LSI SAS expander chips, or something else?
> 
> -- 
> Andrew Gabriel
> 
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