Disk Controllers with 3TB support

[Mercutio]

I've managed to obtain a half dozen Hitachi 3TB drives. I have exactly two machines where I can fully use a 3TB drive, and even at that it appears that I only have a total of four usable ports.

So I need a nice disk controller with large drive support, and perhaps someone else will find this useful.

90 seconds of Googling tells me I can use a Dell H700 or H800 SAS contoller. Nothing from the PERC line supports them.

Promise's support site does not seem helpful for its current offerings.

Adaptec supports large drives on some of its controllers and firmware revisions.

Highpoint's web site says nothing, but a few users report compatibility issues with current products.

3ware's 96xx+ controllers can handle the drives. Older ones can't.

 

[MaxBurn]

Some external RAID enclosures support them now. Aboutnall I know about.

 

[ddrueding]

I found that a bunch of the controllers on Gigabyte and Intel boards support them, but only in IDE mode, not AHCI or RAID.

 

[Mercutio]

That could very well be why they show up as 750GB on the machines I have.
Nonetheless, I'm not that far from needing a bunch of compatible ports, so it's good to get this out there.

 

[MaxBurn]

Would a SAS expander help here?

 

[Mercutio]

Would a SAS expander help here?

I'm not sure. It seems like the market is crying out for some inexpensive options with 8 ports and > 2TB support but they just aren't there. Not all SAS cards support expanders and not all SAS cards play nice with > 2TB drives, and what's left starts at about $450. That's just painful.

 

[Mercutio]

Looking at 1155, 1366 and AM3 stuff, it looks like motherboards top out at 12 SATA ports, not all of which can be assumed compatible with the drives. A new motherboard is cheaper than an 8-port RAID card.

 

[ddrueding]

I haven't had any of the recent motherboards not take 3TB drives in IDE mode, even on the 3rd party connectors.

 

[Stereodude]

But why do we have to use IDE mode?

 

[ddrueding]

No idea. But it worked the first time and doesn't affect me at all, so I haven't bothered looking into it.

 

[Mercutio]

I really don't care. It's about all about density anyway.
Unfortunately, I can't really bring myself to turn of AHCI mode on my i7s. That would suck for their SSDs.

 

[ddrueding]

Unfortunately, I can't really bring myself to turn of AHCI mode on my i7s. That would suck for their SSDs.

I don't know what effect AHCI has on SSDs, another advantage to having them as PCIe.

 

[Mercutio]

Win7/Server 2008 need AHCI mode turned on to enable some of the built-in SSD optimizations.

 

[Mercutio]

My personal winner was the IBM ServerRAID M1015. They're $75 on Ebay, support SAS expanders and 3TB disks, SAS and SATA drives, use a pair of SFF internal connectors and they have hardware support for RAID 0, 1 and 10.

That beats the hell out of $400 for a Dell H700.

 

[Handruin]

Thanks for the info. $75 is a decent price and it looks like RAID 5 is also supported on that IBM card.

Did you ever determine if the H700 can handle 3TB drives? I have one Dell H700 in production in a work server that's managing six 2TB drives in RAID 10 and it performs well for our needs. The price for it was expensive, we went with the 1GB NVRAM option. I would like to have one at home, but you're right, $400 is a bit much for this card.

 

[MaxBurn]

Field upgradeability to RAID 5, 50 via M1000 Series Advance Feature Key

How much extra is they key?

Oh according to the site the card is $300 and the key is $129.

 

[ddrueding]

Looks like the key is about $110 online.

 

[Mercutio]

The H700 and H800 will do 3TB now and supposedly the H200 will with a firmware update that isn't out yet.

 

[LunarMist]

The 3TB Hibachi drives work fine on the LSI 9211-8i with the latest firmware.

 

[Mercutio]

Yes but I could buy three M1505s for what that LSI card costs.

 

[Bookmage]

The DEll H200 works with the latest firmware... so will the Dell External 6Gbps SAS controller... Im using it with an HP SAS expander and 10 x hitachi 5400 3TB drives... previous firmware only read 2.2TB. All of the LSI 2008SAS controllers will read the 3TB drives with the newer firmware update.
The delltechcenter article on 3TB drives hasnt been updated since earlier this year and the firmware has been updated since... I thought I saw the PERCs updated as well, but id have to check the firmware page of a Poweredge server...

Otherwise that M1505 is the popular SAS card to buy... which also works with SAS expanders...

 

[LunarMist]

Yes but I could buy three M1505s for what that LSI card costs.

Sure if you are buying a bunch of them. Is there any known controller limit after 2TB, and I don't mean the full 48 bits.

 

[picasso566]

2012 Update

My personal winner was the IBM ServerRAID M1015. They're $75 on Ebay, support SAS expanders and 3TB disks, SAS and SATA drives, use a pair of SFF internal connectors and they have hardware support for RAID 0, 1 and 10.

That beats the hell out of $400 for a Dell H700.

I know I'm late on this but it may help someone.

First of all, the H700 supports 3TB drives just fine, but now it's September 2012 and I have the latest firmware.

The IBM ServerRAID M1015 is a great card, but one of the reasons the H700/800 is so much more is that it has non-volatile battery backed up memory. If you have a raid 5 for instance and the power goes out, someone pulls the wrong cable in the rack, when you turn the machine back on, the latest writes are safe. Because of this feature, speed is also slightly increased. Now I'm using 3TB 7200RPM 64MB cache SATA III drives, which aren't exactly slow, but this slight increase is not noticeable. What I don't want is RAID corruption if the power goes out.

Also, look at the price of the LSI card which is it's equivalent (same chipset anyway). It's far more expensive.

I also got my H700 on eBay for $299. So not that outrageous.

 

[Mercutio]

That is not outrageous, except for the part where someone can buy four M1015s for what an H700 costs. Since I almost always use SoftRAID systems and since my applications are not terribly write-intensive and since I have good UPSes, I'm more than willing to make that tradeoff.

 

[picasso566]

That is not outrageous, except for the part where someone can buy four M1015s for what an H700 costs. Since I almost always use SoftRAID systems and since my applications are not terribly write-intensive and since I have good UPSes, I'm more than willing to make that tradeoff.

Oh sure, I'm just saying that they both have their place. I've been using the battery pack PERCs since... wow I feel even older than I did just a minute ago. I have never had RAID corruption under any circumstance besides drive failures in all sorts of environments. So the outrageous prices on them (are they really like $600 new?? OK I found some for $400 new also) are justified in that performance bracket.

 

[Adcadet]

Still looking for a decent 4+ port PCIe (1x or 4x) SATA III card. Not particularly concerned with RAID. And I still want to be able to store >2 TB locally (preferably 6 TB), plus I like having two hot swap bays to rotate backup drives through. Anybody know if the Marvell 9120 controller supports 3+ TB drives? Seems people online have issues, but it's not clear to me if their using GPT.

Newegg thinks I need to spend $99 for a HighPoint device. I seemed to have become allergic to HighPoint some time in the past 10 years. Have they gotten better?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115077

Prior thread on this topic:
http://www.storageforum.net/forum/showthread.php/9391-Good-SATA-card

 

[LunarMist]

Gee, 46% of users rate it one droplet out of five.

 

[Adcadet]

Droplet? I thought those were tears.

 

[LunarMist]

A coma-shaped object.

 

[mubs]

What's wrong with you guys? Those be eggs!

 

[Mercutio]

The Marvell 9120 controller on my Asus P67whateverthehell here will at least see a 4TB drive that's plugged in to it.

 

[LunarMist]

Which card with that controller is reliable?

 

[Mercutio]

I doubt very much that it matters. Whatever you're getting will almost certainly be a reference design. If you want something that's been customized and seriously validated, you're almost certainly looking at a rebadged LSI controller at this point. Both the Dell and IBM controllers mentioned earlier are in that category.

 

[Howell]

A coma-shaped object.

I've always wondered what a coma would be shaped like.

 

[Stereodude]

Did anyone ever try the Dell H700 PERC cards? Reportedly they removed the firmware block on non Dell drives several years back. I'm beginning to think about updating my server and I will need drives larger than 2TB. I'd like RAID-6. I see H700's for around $100 on ebay. The 5i cards were very popular and there were long threads on many forums about them. I'm not finding that same level of enthusiast usage and posting about the H700.

 

[Handruin]

I used one of them but in an actual Dell server with drives that shipped from Dell. The card itself was fine but we never tried adding any new drives that were outside of Dell.

I've chosen a different path for my new updated server which will be based on an integrated LSI 2308 card on a Supermicro X10SL7-F motherboard. I plan to flash the LSI firmware into IT mode and manage the volumes using ZFS. Basically this was a lesser expensive way to get 8 decent ports on a motherboard and still have a full x8 PCIe 3.0 slot for future expansion if needed. This way I'm no longer controller-dependent with my raid config and have a much better scaling solution. Newegg has a packaged deal with this X10SL7-F board and an Intel xeon E3 1270 v3 CPU that I ordered (Basically it's a i7 4770 Haswell with ECC). The board has a BMC to manage it through a headless IPMI. I plan to use the 8 x SAS/SATA ports for the 4TB drives, 2 x SATA 6 for L2ARC/ZIL SSD config, and 1 x SATA 3 for OS boot. I'll dual-purpose the setup for streaming/managing content to my devices as well as backup with my other NAS.

My point being, I also no longer find the enthusiasm of using a dedicated raid card for NAS or large datastore provisioning after playing with ZFS.

 

[Mercutio]

You might want to be sure that you're OK with the work involved in adding zPools or expanding existing ones. If you have limited numbers of ports, bringing a new, large zPool online to copy your data to is going to be beyond your resources. If you're under any kind of time pressure, upgrading member disks in a zPool is a deeply shitty process. ZFS is marvelous but those two things are not what I would call its strong suit.

 

[Handruin]

Part of the purpose for building a ZFS-based NAS is to help increase my understandings of its benefits and shortcomings. Using/managing/developing for ZFS is now part of my job so I want to know it well.

I don't know why I'd need more than a single pool for quite some time. Can't I thin-provision and continue to add devices into it over time assuming each device is of the same size/type?

 

[CougTek]

I thought ZFS was dog-slow on anything else than Solaris/Open Indiana. Chewy must have written about this sometime in the last few years.

 

[Handruin]

I thought ZFS was dog-slow on anything else than Solaris/Open Indiana. Chewy must have written about this sometime in the last few years.

Depends on how it's configured. We use it under CentOS at work. I'll run some benchmarks once I get it up and running.