Which one has better support for FreeBSD , LSI or Areca ? with multiport support

[Pepe (Jose) Amengual]

Hi Guys.

I have a super micro server with this controller :

http://www.addonics.com/products/adsa3gpx8-4e.php <http://Addonics
Controler>

Connected to and Addonics storage rack via 4 eSata ports and port
multipliers to 10 disks using ZFS.

It has been working fine but lately I have been experience some issues with
channel timeout and disk just disappearing from the pool. I already posted
another thread about that but looks like no one has clue about what the
errors means so I decided to swap controllers with a spare one and same
issue.

So now I have decided to buy a real controller, Areca or LSI for the server
but I need one that is port multiplier compatible and with external esata
connectors.

I just one a very good controller ( not super expensive) that has good
drivers for freebsd and that can give me reliable tools to diagnose
hardrive failures and diagnostics.

I have the possibility to move to iSCSI too using an addonics module for
that so I could move to a different setup but I don't know is I will have
any benefit on I/O speed doing that or not.

If someone can give me some advice I will really appreciate.

Thanks.

[Mike Tancsa]

Post by Pepe (Jose) Amengual
So now I have decided to buy a real controller, Areca or LSI for the server
but I need one that is port multiplier compatible and with external esata
connectors.

Not sure about the eSata ports, but we are testing the newer 3ware
controllers (9750) that use the tws driver. Its a SAS controller, but
you can use SATA drives on them.

They seem to be quite fast! In the past, we have used the twe and twa
based controllers from 3ware and have had very good results with them
over the years. The monitoring facilities are great (CLI and web
based). We have had drive failures over the years, and replacing them
has been painless

We also use a number of the older series Areca cards (ARC-1210) and they
too have been solid. The monitoring daemon is a little quirky at first,
but it works well as does the CLI tool. I havent tried any of their
newer SAS controllers, but they use the same arcmsr driver which is
actively maintained by Areca.

In short, I think you would do really well with either card.

---Mike

[Theodor-Iulian Ciobanu]

On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 13:25:22 -0700

Post by Pepe (Jose) Amengual
Hi Guys.
http://www.addonics.com/products/adsa3gpx8-4e.php <http://Addonics
Controler>
Connected to and Addonics storage rack via 4 eSata ports and port
multipliers to 10 disks using ZFS.
It has been working fine but lately I have been experience some
issues with channel timeout and disk just disappearing from the pool.
I already posted another thread about that but looks like no one has
clue about what the errors means so I decided to swap controllers
with a spare one and same issue.
So now I have decided to buy a real controller, Areca or LSI for the
server but I need one that is port multiplier compatible and with
external esata connectors.
I just one a very good controller ( not super expensive) that has good
drivers for freebsd and that can give me reliable tools to diagnose
hardrive failures and diagnostics.
I have the possibility to move to iSCSI too using an addonics module
for that so I could move to a different setup but I don't know is I
will have any benefit on I/O speed doing that or not.
If someone can give me some advice I will really appreciate.
Thanks.

After moving away from Windows I also moved away from Areca, as I found
poor support for it, although the drivers are official:
- no hotplug (new discs were not picked up automatically, I had to
reboot)
- low transfer speeds (I found it bottlenecking at ~200MB/s, with
Ultrastar 3TB discs being detected as SATA1)

And Areca is actually the reason I moved to FreeBSD in the first place.
After the v1.49 firmware update on my 1280s and 1880s, rebuild times
increased to unacceptable values (what would before take ~1day would
now require 1-2 weeks). When contacted, Areca's support told me they
didn't notice any slowdowns with the latest fw version, any problems
I had must be on my part. So I gave up on hardware raid and moved to
ZFS.

And if you really want to be pedantic about it, Areca are using LSI
chipsets as well now, so why not just buy directly from them?

[Matt Burke]

Post by Theodor-Iulian Ciobanu
After moving away from Windows I also moved away from Areca, as I found

When I tried the Areca 1320 HBA earlier this year, I found that using the
CLI caused the FreeBSD 9 driver to panic the machine. Submitted a support
request and 2 days later I had an email with a new driver build attached,
which was soon after added to their website.

Their support is actually pretty good!

Post by Theodor-Iulian Ciobanu
- no hotplug (new discs were not picked up automatically, I had to
reboot)

Works perfectly on the 1320.

Post by Theodor-Iulian Ciobanu
- low transfer speeds (I found it bottlenecking at ~200MB/s, with
Ultrastar 3TB discs being detected as SATA1)

Attached to an Areca 1320, 16x disks (7200rpm SAS, max speed 140MB/s) are
able to deliver >2GB/s combined write speed [1].

SATA support on these is limited however to SATA2 (220MB/sec per disk). The
only SATA disks I use are SSDs (for ZFS ZIL/L2ARC), so I'm more bothered
about latency.

When latency is measured via DTrace on a busy machine, there is no
difference between the same make/model of SSD attached to the Areca card or
an onboard SATA3 AHCI controller [2].



[1] Running 16 parallel instances of 'dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M of=/dev/da..'.
gstripe was massively slower.

[2] ahci0: <Intel Patsburg AHCI SATA controller> port
0x9070-0x9077,0x9060-0x9063,0x9050-0x9057,0x9040-0x9043,0x9020-0x903f mem
0xdfc22000-0xdfc227ff irq 19 at device 31.2 on pci0
ahci0: AHCI v1.30 with 6 6Gbps ports, Port Multiplier not supported

arcsas1: <arcsas1: ARC1320 PCIe to SAS 6G Host Bus Adapter.