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Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2011 17:39:23 +0200
From: Leon =?iso-8859-15?Q?Me=DFner?= <l.messner@physik.tu-berlin.de>
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Subject: Re: SAS controller for FreeBSD
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On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 06:51:37PM -0400, Daniel Feenberg wrote:
> 
> We have been using ZFS under FreeBSD for a while, and are very pleased, 
> but are considering building a system with SAS drives, in the hope that 
> they will be faster (any truth to that?). I am assuming that I should look 
> for a non-RAID controller, but I can't find any SAS controllers that don't 
> claim to do RAID and are on the FreeBSD compatibility list. I have always 
> thought that using a RAID controller for a non-raid partition was a bad 
> idea, since it limited ones ability to swap controllersm, and presumably 
> if we are using ZFS for our RAID we don't need another level of RAID 
> provided by the controller. Is that prejudice justified?
> 
> There are some SAS RAID controllers that claim to support FreeBSD but I 
> can't tell if their JBOD mode is a true pass-through, or leaves some 
> undesirable junk on the disk.
> 
> So does anyone have a recomendation for a reasonably priced SAS 
> controller? We aren't looking for anything fancy at this point.

We are using two of the LSI SAS2008 based cards here and have no
problems with them. Be sure to run a recent STABLE as the mps driver is
relatively new. Speed and reliability are very nice. The only thing we
are missing is IR-Firmware support but if you only want a HBA this won't
bother you.

cherio,
Leon