Assuming you are using 3.0Gbps mechanical drives, and IT mode firmware, is there any particular reason to prefer an LSI 2008-based controller over the older 1068e? From what I've read the power consumption is about the same. The only thing I can come up with is that, since the 2008 has a PCIe 2.0 interface running at 5GT/s per lane, you could run it in a x4 slot and still get full performance with mechanical drives (assuming 8 SAS/SATA ports per HBA).
LSI 1068e vs 2008 in JBOD
- Thread starter Metaluna
- Start date
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SAS2008 based card: Better compatibility with expanders, ability to use multiple interconnects to aggregate bandwidth, SAS2008 chip is capable are far more IOPS, SAS2008 will scale better with more drives. The key is greater multiple concurrent I/O, meaning you can read/write from more JBOD disks simultaneously on a SAS2008 than on earlier SAS-1 based chips. There are many usage scenarios that benefit from the greater "switching capacity" (IOPS) of the SAS2008.
Not to mention the 1068e does annoying stuff like reverses the drive order when connecting to a backplane with a miniSAS connector - just for that reason alone I don't own any.
Not to mention the 1068e does annoying stuff like reverses the drive order when connecting to a backplane with a miniSAS connector - just for that reason alone I don't own any.
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Only adding two things to odditory's list:
1. Cost: The LSI 1068e cards are a bit cheaper although that M1015 comes close
2. FreeBSD/ FreeNAS: Until SAS2008 support is in the stable release, the 1068e is potentially the better fit here
1. Cost: The LSI 1068e cards are a bit cheaper although that M1015 comes close
2. FreeBSD/ FreeNAS: Until SAS2008 support is in the stable release, the 1068e is potentially the better fit here
Not surprising that FreeBSD doesn't support it, it doesn't even support the 9211-8i natively which OpenSolaris/NexentaCore/Solaris Express 11 do under the mpt2sas driver.
Have you tried looking if LSI provides a FreeBSD driver? I had to manually install the 9240-8i driver to get the M1015 to work with Solaris Express 11.
Have you tried looking if LSI provides a FreeBSD driver? I had to manually install the 9240-8i driver to get the M1015 to work with Solaris Express 11.
Yes LSI does have a FreeBSD 8.x driver for the 9240-8i, but it appears to be the same mfi driver that's supposed to be compiled into the kernel by default (actually the mfi driver in 8.2RC appears to be newer) and it still doesn't work. Maybe it doesn't recognize the m1015 as a compatible device. I'll have to try SE11 again, as I never went far enough with it to try installing the driver manually. The firmware does recognize drives that are plugged into it, so hopefully that means the card isn't defective, at least.
Actually, that's why I started this thread, since I wanted to make sure it was worth the effort to keep tinkering with this card.
Actually, that's why I started this thread, since I wanted to make sure it was worth the effort to keep tinkering with this card.
Well it worked fine for me on Solaris Express 11, like I said. In fact, I set up a ZFS pool with a 9211-8i card (using native mpt2sas driver), exported pool, switched to M1015 card, installed LSI 9240-8i driver manually following instructions in LSI's readme file, re-imported pool and not only did it work but bonnie++ benchmarks were pretty much identical as well.