Anyone have success using T10-PI / 520-byte protection information with LSI RAID?

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jcl333

Active Member
May 28, 2011
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74
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Hello,

I just got some really nice LSI 9361-8i controllers, and I noticed in the software that this controller and the drives I am using support this feature to protect against silent data corruption.

Older post here has the sg-format commands to do it:
https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...bo-20x-for-650-obo-free-shipping.17192/page-3

But has anyone tried this and had success? If it works it could be a nice feature and simpler than ZFS/ReFS...

-JCL
 

vanfawx

Active Member
Jan 4, 2015
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Vancouver, Canada
My understanding is none of the MegaRAID cards support 520 byte sectors. Typically you'll only run into 520 byte sectors with drives from a SAN (Netapp, IBM, EMC, etc).
 

Whaaat

Active Member
Jan 31, 2020
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157
43
T10-PI is not equivalent to 520 byte block size. You can have 512 byte sectors and PI at the same time. Here is for example IBM drive formatted with PI type 2 works with old LSI SAS 2008
Code:
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:               IBM-XIV
Product:              ST33000650SS  B1
Revision:             BC36
Compliance:           SPC-4
User Capacity:        3 000 592 982 016 bytes [3,00 TB]
Logical block size:   512 bytes
Formatted with type 2 protection
8 bytes of protection information per logical block
Rotation Rate:        7200 rpm
Form Factor:          3.5 inches
Logical Unit id:      0x5000c500560c5193
Serial number:        Z296CZAD0000C32825HB
Device type:          disk
Transport protocol:   SAS (SPL-3)
Local Time is:        Sun Jun 28 19:27:29 2020 FLEDT
SMART support is:     Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is:     Enabled
Temperature Warning:  Enabled
Read Cache is:        Enabled
Writeback Cache is:   Enabled
 

jcl333

Active Member
May 28, 2011
253
74
28
My understanding is none of the MegaRAID cards support 520 byte sectors. Typically you'll only run into 520 byte sectors with drives from a SAN (Netapp, IBM, EMC, etc).
Yep, that is what I thought too. But there it is.
 

jcl333

Active Member
May 28, 2011
253
74
28
T10-PI is not equivalent to 520 byte block size. You can have 512 byte sectors and PI at the same time. Here is for example IBM drive formatted with PI type 2 works with old LSI SAS 2008
Code:
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:               IBM-XIV
Product:              ST33000650SS  B1
Revision:             BC36
Compliance:           SPC-4
User Capacity:        3 000 592 982 016 bytes [3,00 TB]
Logical block size:   512 bytes
Formatted with type 2 protection
8 bytes of protection information per logical block
Rotation Rate:        7200 rpm
Form Factor:          3.5 inches
Logical Unit id:      0x5000c500560c5193
Serial number:        Z296CZAD0000C32825HB
Device type:          disk
Transport protocol:   SAS (SPL-3)
Local Time is:        Sun Jun 28 19:27:29 2020 FLEDT
SMART support is:     Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is:     Enabled
Temperature Warning:  Enabled
Read Cache is:        Enabled
Writeback Cache is:   Enabled
Yes, reading the documents, drives like these can still report as 512-bytes logically even though they are actually formatted 520. Notice that it even stipulates this in the details about the protection.

Actually, that would be interesting, if I format one of my drives that way, I wonder how it would show up in this situation.

Can I ask you which command are you using to get this output?

-JCL