Hello, wondering if anyone has used or tried to use this feature, I am having trouble finding enough information on it.
I thought this was a feature reserved for commercial SAN vendors or other special applications, but now I am not so sure.
I kept seeing to references like needing support all the way from the disk to the application and everything in between would need to be aware of and support the feature for it to work. But, of course we use our SAN with VMware and Windows, neither of which support T10-PI that I am aware of, let alone the applications. The SAN is taking care of it in the background and just serving out virtual disks.
What I think I have established is:
- The disks themselves need to be SAS, and need to support T10-PI as well as be formatted to do so
- The controller/driver/firmware also need to support it
I have an LSI MegaRAID SAS 9361-8i
The hardware and software clearly mentions support for T10-Pi "Protection Information".
Here is a shot from Storage Authority running from Windows
Here are some of the more useful / helpful resources I have found explaining this feature:
This is an old article talking about the differences between SAS and SATA, but it goes into great detail about PI:
SAS vs. SATA
Interestingly, it also goes into the relative merits of ZFS and how it can and can not address some of the issues.
This is a PDF from Seagate with really good information about their support for the feature:
https://www.seagate.com/files/stati...-from-corruption-technology-paper-tp621us.pdf
Both the SAS spinners and SSDs I am using came out of an EMC SAN, and were originally 520-byte drives that I re-formatted to 512-byte so that I could use them.
I am wondering, if I were to format them back to 520-byte drives again, would that be recognized by the controller and allow me to enable this feature?
You have to have an HBA or be in JBOD mode to be able to format the drives, but that is easy enough.
It might be slightly inconvenient because regular Windows and say TrueNAS probably would not recognize the drives directly.
But, the trade-off could be being able to have check summing / silent data corruption protection in hardware, without having to wrestle with ZFS or ReFS.
Has anyone tried this?
Thanks
-JCL
P.S. - I also purchased the super-cap backed cache and the license for CacheCade 2.0 that allows me to use a pool of SSDs as cache, should be interesting to see how it performs. I am using it with 16x 4TB spinners + 4x 400Gig SSDs in a R60+R1 setup. This gives me 743GB of cache and just over 43TB usable.
I thought this was a feature reserved for commercial SAN vendors or other special applications, but now I am not so sure.
I kept seeing to references like needing support all the way from the disk to the application and everything in between would need to be aware of and support the feature for it to work. But, of course we use our SAN with VMware and Windows, neither of which support T10-PI that I am aware of, let alone the applications. The SAN is taking care of it in the background and just serving out virtual disks.
What I think I have established is:
- The disks themselves need to be SAS, and need to support T10-PI as well as be formatted to do so
- The controller/driver/firmware also need to support it
I have an LSI MegaRAID SAS 9361-8i
The hardware and software clearly mentions support for T10-Pi "Protection Information".
Here is a shot from Storage Authority running from Windows
Here are some of the more useful / helpful resources I have found explaining this feature:
This is an old article talking about the differences between SAS and SATA, but it goes into great detail about PI:
SAS vs. SATA
Interestingly, it also goes into the relative merits of ZFS and how it can and can not address some of the issues.
This is a PDF from Seagate with really good information about their support for the feature:
https://www.seagate.com/files/stati...-from-corruption-technology-paper-tp621us.pdf
Both the SAS spinners and SSDs I am using came out of an EMC SAN, and were originally 520-byte drives that I re-formatted to 512-byte so that I could use them.
I am wondering, if I were to format them back to 520-byte drives again, would that be recognized by the controller and allow me to enable this feature?
- I would have to figure out the exact command to do it, but I am close to figuring it out
You have to have an HBA or be in JBOD mode to be able to format the drives, but that is easy enough.
It might be slightly inconvenient because regular Windows and say TrueNAS probably would not recognize the drives directly.
But, the trade-off could be being able to have check summing / silent data corruption protection in hardware, without having to wrestle with ZFS or ReFS.
Has anyone tried this?
Thanks
-JCL
P.S. - I also purchased the super-cap backed cache and the license for CacheCade 2.0 that allows me to use a pool of SSDs as cache, should be interesting to see how it performs. I am using it with 16x 4TB spinners + 4x 400Gig SSDs in a R60+R1 setup. This gives me 743GB of cache and just over 43TB usable.
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