Topic: Compatible Hard Drive Controller for Big Drives

[sajmosia]

Hi Everyone.

I have been presented with a small problem.
It is time to upgrade and move to SME 9. I have found myself a nice hardware which is about 2 year old workstation and bought two 4TB Drives to mirror.

The problem I have is that the on-board controllers can't see any drives bigger than 2TB or report the drives as 2TB or less.

The question I have is Could you please suggest a relatively cheap PCIE SATA III Hard Drive Controller that will be fully compatible with SME 9 and support both RAID1 and Large Hard Drives Please ?

Thanks a lot in advance.

[guest22]

Hi sajmosa and welcome,


instead of using 'exotic' hardware, why don't you save yourself the (future) troubles and pick hardware that suits your needs and is compatible according the hardware compatibility list?


I know it is tempting to use hardware you have laying around, but looking at the costs for descent hardware and the lifetime of SME9, I would buy myself a HP Microserver or comparable. It may well be worth while instead of constantly looking over your shoulder for up to date drivers and hacks.


guest

[sajmosia]

Thank you very much for reply.

I think you are right about the old hardware however this workstation is a dual quad core Xeon with 16Gb of ram per processor and I thought this would be more than enough to host SME9.
If I could have a relatively decent home server at a cost of SATA controller then I think this could be a winner.

However if it comes to the worst and I will have to buy new hardware from scratch then the entire upgrade will have to wait.

Thanks.

[guest22]

I'm sure that some brilliant mind will come up with a good suggestion within the next couple of hours.

[Stefano]

this workstation is a dual quad core Xeon with 16Gb of ram per processor

a big "beast", indeed

and I thought this would be more than enough to host SME9.

indeed..

If I could have a relatively decent home server at a cost of SATA controller then I think this could be a winner.

please define "home server", because such an HW is not, IMVHO, a "home" server.. I usually work with production servers with 20/30 users that run on HP microserver..

That said, all you've got to do is search for RH certified hw.. google will help you..
but, let me say, you'll probably find only expensive hw..
moreover, I would not store terabytes of data (ah, what about backup?) on something I can't rely.. at the end, probably you'll find that a HP microserver is less expensive and more reliable (and it is extremely silent and "green" too)

[sajmosia]

Hi,

Definition of "Home Server" is not really something I can elaborate on too much but It will run a couple of Minecraft servers for my daughter and a couple of virtual machines for me etc. these need memory and processing power is welcome.

As to storage, the majority of content is going to be video that is easily recoverable even if both disks die at the same time.
You are right about hosting 30 user on a mini £300 ProLiant with Celeron on board, because How much space can word documents produced by 30 people take, as I am sure you're not running any VMs on it.

As to search on google, yes I have spent last couple of weeks of searches but all I found is either £600 LSI cards that are far too much for me or some cheap £100 cards which nobody knows anything about.

Usually specifications for those cards do not include the maximum drive capacity supported. All about speed but nothing on size.

I have called some vendors like CCL Online or Dabs to ask specifically that one question: "Will it take my big drives?"

The answer is usually "Please hold on a minute" and after a while "My college is not sure".
Asking "Can you suggest one for me that will" usually meets with something on the line of "I'm just a silly young sales girl and I don't know"

That is why I came here as a measure of last resort...

Am I asking for too much ?

Thanks.

[Stefano]

no, you're not..

unfortunately, as you already discovered, it isn't an easy task..

I would suggest you 3ware controllers.. they are good, documentation is fine and certification too.. but I'm afraid they'll cost you a bit..

[sajmosia]

Hi,

As you said this is a tedious task.

Taking your suggestion went to LSI Site. Found a controller that could potentially be ok, but again nothing on a disk size it will take.

Do you think this will suffice ?

http://www.lsi.com/products/raid-controllers/pages/megaraid-sas-9260-8i.aspx#tab/tab2

I don't really need 8 ports but that I can Live with.

Ps. Just contacted LSI, kindly asking them to update all specifications of their products with the information on maximum hard drive capacity the particular controller can take. (...)

Well ... not really, that was a lie, but it would be nice if they did.

However I did contact them with the same question and this is what I have so far :

"​Thank you! Your request for more information is being processed. An LSI representative will get back to you within 48 hours."

I will update this post when they do reply.

Thank you all again for help.

[DanB35]

FWIW, the FreeNAS folks seem to like the IBM M1015, which is a rebadged LSI card and is pretty readily available on eBay for around $100 US.  It can operate as a RAID controller or an HBA, if you reflash the firmware to IT mode.  It does handle > 2 TB capacity disks.  I can't directly speak to compatibility with RHEL/CentOS/SME, but my general understanding is that Linux does better with hardware support than FreeBSD.  IOW, if FreeBSD supports it, I'd think there's a good chance Linux would as well.

I have no personal experience with this card, but here's a detailed thread on the FreeNAS forums about it and other LSI cards: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/confused-about-that-lsi-card-join-the-crowd.11901/

[janet]

sajmosia

The problem I have is that the on-board controllers can't see any drives bigger than 2TB or report the drives as 2TB or less.

How did you determine this ?
Did you actually install SME9 & check with
df -h
&
fdisk -l

Did you format the drives with GPT partitions ?

There was a post or posts here recently that stated SME 9 did recognize drives larger than 2Tb, so search back a few weeks or a month or two.
Here is one search result
http://forums.contribs.org/index.php/topic,50819.msg256567.html#msg256567

This is the post & thread I was referring to

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php/topic,51075.msg258621.html#msg258621