[OpenIndiana-discuss] SATA Expansion cards

[cjt]

On 02/01/2015 01:49 PM, Andrew Gabriel 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?
>


SATA drives, specifically a bunch of Seagate ST3000DM001's.  Here's the 
info on the expander:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816117207

which links to the "horse's mouth:"

http://ark.intel.com/products/49596/Intel-RAID-Expander-RES2SV240

which says it's an LSI SAS2x24 expander at heart.