need help with finding af new raid controller

[Bit Phreak]

Hi guys

I currently have a Adaptec 3805 raid controller utilized in a storage server. I am having some problems with the raid controller. it is dropping a random disk one or to times a month (WD Red 3TB) due to timeouts and maybe a missing TLER support (I think thats the reason)
it is not a big problem because it is configured as a raid10 and when it happens i can just reboot my server and make it rebuild my raid array. but it is getting pretty annoying, because of the time to rebuild 8 x 3TB drives

Can anyone recommend a new ROC controller that dosnt drop my drives?

 

[Lost-Benji]

So you want to replace the symptom rather than the cause?

I personally would be ditching the Reds but then again, the RAID card is showing its age and was never intended for desktop drives.

Google around as there are plenty of forums talking about Reds and what cards they do and don't work with. From what I have seen in my time, LSI and Areca options work for some.

 

[mrkrad]

LSI megaraid would probably work fine assuming you aren't using a crappy sas expander which tends to complicate all raid cards.

 

[Chuckleb]

I agree, the LSI works well with the 3TB red drives.

 

[Bit Phreak]

You are right about fixing the symptom rather than fixing the cause isnt the right way of doint it. but I don't have a million $ to buy 8 x 3tb in storage space of enterprise class harddrives.....

I was looking at the MegaRAID SAS 9240‐8i. any pros / cons on this card?

 

[Chuckleb]

That card is perfectly fine for raid-10 nothing fancy on it. I assume you already know that you will have to break the array and rebuild it done this won't import in. Ideally I would have one more as a hotspare but you are out of ports unless you buy a $200 Intel expander and cable and drive, probably out of budget for now. At least this way if the red drops out again it will rebuild. Try to record which drive drops and replace. The LSI had patrol read which can help identify bad drives and kick them out of the array.

 

[dealcorn]

From a diagnostic perspective, I am uncomfortable that you did not first actually use tler.exe, or whatever, to verify your current card is broken vs that your WD Reds are misconfigured.

 

[hjfr]

You are right about fixing the symptom rather than fixing the cause isnt the right way of doint it. but I don't have a million $ to buy 8 x 3tb in storage space of enterprise class harddrives.....

I was looking at the MegaRAID SAS 9240‐8i. any pros / cons on this card?

You can look the equivalent IBM serveraid version. Often less expensive than LSI card. Check the dedicated topic LSI and OEM models

 

[mobilenvidia]

Isn't the TLER problem going to happen again on a LSI controller ?

Do you fix a flat tire by putting it on a new car ?

If your drives aren't happy on a RAID controller, look at using ZFS, only 4x drives means you can use the Mobo SATA ports, sell the 3805 and you'll have made money out of it all.

 

[Lost-Benji]

Isn't the TLER problem going to happen again on a LSI controller ?
Do you fix a flat tire by putting it on a new car ?
If your drives aren't happy on a RAID controller, look at using ZFS, only 4x drives means you can use the Mobo SATA ports, sell the 3805 and you'll have made money out of it all.

Hey Mobes, the OP has 8 drives

TLER seems to be a common element to all the complaints found.



These 8 drives can be hooked to a M1015 or the likes and used with either ZFS or Windows Storage Spaces. Both don't need RAID cards and get around these issues rather well.

 

[Bit Phreak]

well the plan was to use my hyperv 2008 server and set up a freenas running on zfs. I have 6 sata ports on my mobo and I have actually purchased a nonraid pcie 4 x sata card (which is just sitting in the cornor and looking stupid at me at the moment)
When i installed the freenas on my hyperv i discovered that HyperV wasnt 100% supported by freenas. and i couldnt get the legacy network card online. even if i did try the comon fix to disable / enable the NIC. So i have dropped the freenas and zfs

I think i'll try the M1015. it will cost me about $100 that is not to bad. then ill see it that will fix my problems. thanks for all the replies

 

[Chuckleb]

Random thought, if you are going to spend ~$100 anyway, I think there were some 9240-8is on ebay that are in that price range. Then you'd have hardware RAID-5 (write-through only w/o the battery) in case you wanted to go hardware RAID-5. If no plans for that then the m1015 for JBOD only is a great product and you could get the unlock key later too.

 

[Bit Phreak]

hmmm didnt see that the raid 5 was missing on the m1015. the price is roughly the same on the two cards in denmark. is it possible to mount a battery on the lsi card?

 

[Bit Phreak]

at the moment i use raid 10 i jsu saw that the lsi support raid 50. does anyone use that or is it a "no go"

 

[Chuckleb]

I don't have the specs handy, but I think that the 9240 doesn't even have a cache. If there is no cache, then there is no battery needed. You might have to go up to the 9260 in order to have the cache. You can definitely run a raid without cache/battery, you just have to do write through. The cache just make the performance faster otherwise you are at disk speed instead of cache speed. The raid is perfectly safe, if the battery dies, the array drops to WT mode anyway.

 

[mrkrad]

the 9240 has issues with esxi - without cache it causes lost datastore effect. You cannot afford to have no write-back caching any time (even when battery is discharged) with a hypervisor. which is why they have supercapacitors now!

Don't the cheapie 9260-8i (m5014) still go for cheap? I paid $66 each for those guys and they are in operation to this date with raid-1 sets of samsung 840pro SSD with esxi 5.1 the battery was problematic on the cards and caused more trouble than it was worth, they recently fixed the firmware for that after all these years but having your battery discharge monthly then going to write-through mode for a short period of time is enough to cause ESXi to drop the datastore. inconvenient to say the least.

I'd stick to something with a decent size (1gb) Flash back write cache if possible! with spinning drives! nothing less!

 

[Chuckleb]

Thanks for clarifying! I didn't know abut the problems with ESX and dropping datastores!

Just glanced at ebay sold m5014s and they are averaging for about $150. So price is high up there, but relatively cheap compared to full-blown LSI.