Controller Recommendation MDADM/ZFS

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chinesestunna

Active Member
Jan 23, 2015
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Hi all,

So in a classic case of not doing enough homework, I'm in a awkward situation - I'm moving my 10x3TB MDADM RAID6 array in ESXi VT-d setup to a different system and need a controller to run the drives. I currently acquired the following controllers but it seems neither fits the bill correctly (besides not having enough ports, different issue):
1) Adaptec 5805 - older 3Gbps RAID card but it does support 3TB+ drives. Challenge is most of research reading I've done so far recommends against using it as a dumb HBA for software RAID setups. Also the array already has data so I know I can't initialize disks as JBOD (metadata write to disk) and I can't find a straight answer on running them as "simple volume" even on Adaptec site.
2) SuperMicro AOC-USAS2LP-H8iR - 6Gbps RAID Card based on LSI 2108 chipset.

Both cards above has BBU and 512MB onboard cache and it seems like not ideal for software raid due to writeback and buffering.

So now I'm kind of stuck - from further research it seems that IBM M1015 (or other rebrand) fits the bill either with 2 cards or SAS expander but my challenge is budget (wife) and they run about $80 on eBay with me needing 2. I looked at IBM BR10i but no 3TB support.

Can the storage experts here recommend a controller(s) that would be cheap and reliable for this setup? Or is there someway I can make existing cards play dumb or dumb enough to use?

Thanks!
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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Any chance you can sell the controllers and get 2x M1015's, 9211-8i's or similar?
 

chinesestunna

Active Member
Jan 23, 2015
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Any chance you can sell the controllers and get 2x M1015's, 9211-8i's or similar?
Yea that seems like the course of action I need to take.
I might go with M1015 and that Intel SAS expander in the great deals section as well which will give me more ports and still enough bandwidth.
Patrick, I will do a build thread on this once I get it figured out, motherboard comes in tomorrow :)