Well, I emailed LSI Support with these questions. Their terse but succinct response was:
- You will not be able to see the entire capacity of your 3TB drives if you connect them to the 8480E. If they do show you will only see 2TB of the total size.
- The Megaraid 8480E is a hardware controller card and there is no initiator target firmware available for it.
I can confirm that the current firmware release on the LSI site (Dec, 2010) for the 8480E does not recognise anything beyond 2TB on a 3TB drive. As for the second point, I though many hardware RAID controllers could be reflashed to IT firmware so being a "hardware controller" is not the issue. Several knowledgebase articles seem to suggest this, too. On the other hand, I'll take LSI's word that there is no IT firmware around for the 8480E.
For those who have or are considering this card, here is a summary of my experience with them:
The LSI 8480E is a very reliable and stable hardware RAID controller but you do need to use enterprise-class drives with it. I've been using my 3 controllers with great success for over 3 years now with Samsung 1TB RAID drives in RAID 50 with absolutely no issues on any of my RAID arrays. I have tested the controller's ability to rebuild with hot spares and everything works as it should. I tried some consumer-grade drives (WD 1TB and Seagate 1.5TB) about a year ago to see if there was an issue with TLER (time-limited error recovery: RAID class disks return control to the controller for error recovery much faster than consumer-class drives which tend to try to fix errors on their own. This can cause a hardware RAID controller to assume the consumer-class drive has failed when it actually hasn't.) and, as expected, the consumer drives would drop out with alarming frequency causing array degradation and rebuilds almost constantly. In my configuration, a rebuild took over 72 hours. After a successful rebuild, the array would degrade again within 3-4 days. I never had a case where a drive in the degraded array failed during rebuild but it was only a matter of time. The controller firmware will allow you to set the response time for a drive but this test was done with the timing set to the maximum interval. An initiator-target firmware could potentially eliminate the TLER issue.
Thus, it would appear that the LSI 8480E is not a suitable controller for people looking for a way to use lower cost, consumer-grade, high capacity hard drives. I hope this helps some of you.
For myself, I've ordered a bunch of IBM M1015s to test with the "Cool-spin" Hitachi 3TB consumer drives in software RAID arrays.
