LSI SAS 9207-8i - Questions

[Zonediver]

Hi Guys,

I have two questions about the LSI SAS 9207-8i:

1) I read that the controller takes up to 5 minutes to boot. A very long time... Can anybody confirm this?

2) Is the controller compatible with the sleep function of unraid?

Thats very important for me because the server is not always needed and has to go to sleep for saving Money (and Energy).

Thanks for your help

Edited September 7, 2019 by Zonediver

[Vr2Io]

1) Can on the fly if config mainboard BIOS not init HBA BIOS

 

2) S3 sleep not only hardware relateed, OS also need suppprt, and all hardware also a factor.

 

[Zonediver]

3 hours ago, Benson said:

1) Can on the fly if config mainboard BIOS not init HBA BIOS

 

2) S3 sleep not only hardware relateed, OS also need suppprt, and all hardware also a factor.

 

To Point 1):

I've probably put it that way badly. I've read that the controller takes up to 5 minutes to detect all attached drives, which significantly slows down the boot process. I wanted to know if anyone could confirm that?

Edited September 8, 2019 by Zonediver

[trott]

I'm using 9207-8i now, I can say it will add about 45s to the boot process

 

btw, if you want to spin down the HDD, then it might have issues;  when I move the data to array, I might the HDD using UD. I notice the HDD will spin down automatically, but when you wake it up, syslog will have some read error, after google-fu, it seems it take too long to wake the HDD.

 

Edited September 8, 2019 by trott

[Zonediver]

16 minutes ago, trott said:

I'm using 9207-8i now, I can say it will add about 45s to the boot process

 

btw, if you want to spin down the HDD, then it might have issues;  when I move the data to array, I might the HDD using UD. I notice the HDD will spin down automatically, but when you wake it up, syslog will have some read error, after google-fu, it seems it take too long to wake the HDD.

 

Hi trott and thanks for this info - 45sec is ok - so i dont know why some people told about 3-5min...

Regarding the wakeup of the HDDs: What does this mean exactly? Is the sleeping disk not spin up or is it only "slow" so that the syslog get an entry?

Can you provide the Google-Link to this "problem"? Thanks

Edited September 8, 2019 by Zonediver

[trott]

basically when you access a HDD in sleep mode,  it take too long to wake it up, so the read/write request will return a time out error, similar as below

 

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/4713

[Frank1940]

13 hours ago, Zonediver said:

I read that the controller takes up to 5 minutes to boot.

Where did you read this?  What was the explanation (if any) given? 

 

The reason for these questions is that there are a lot of Folks who are using the LSI cards with Unraid and that are basically three favors of these cards (hardware wise) and each of these can have different software/firmware that is loaded onto them to which LSI assigned a slightly different part numbers.  (That is why I find that it is so confusing when looking at these cards on places like E-bay.  Many times they are advertised using the using the the wrong part number or with the part number that they have converted to loading different software/firmware on them.  To further confuse the issue, sometimes, LSI based OEM cards are crossed flashed with LSI software.)   No one using Unraid is complaining about the increase in boot time of LSI cards that have the IT Mode software loaded onto them whether they came from the factory that way or had it done later.  If you happen to get one loaded with the RAID software, then the boot time may be significant longer.  If you get an LSI card called 9207-8i (which is the P/N that LSI assigned to their card loaded with IT Mode software/Firmware) with the 9207-8i hardware but loaded with one of the RAID versions of software/firmware (which would have given it a different LIS part number), you have been a victim of deceptive advertising.

Edited September 8, 2019 by Frank1940

[Zonediver]

3 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

Where did you read this?  What was the explanation (if any) given? 

 

The reason for these questions is that there are a lot of Folks who are using the LSI cards with Unraid and that are basically three favors of these cards (hardware wise) and each of these can have different software/firmware that is loaded onto them to which LSI assigned a slightly different part number.  (That is why I find that it is so confusing when looking at these cards on places like E-bay.  Many times they are advertised using the using the the wrong part number or with the part number that they have converted to loading different software/firmware on them.  To further confuse the issue, sometimes, LSI based OEM cards are crossed flashed with LSI software.)   No one using Unraid is complaining about the increase in boot time of LSI cards that have the IT Mode software loaded onto them whether they came from the factory that way or had it done later.  If you happen to get one loaded with the RAID software, then the boot time may be significant longer.  If you get an LSI card called 9207-8i (which is the P/N that LSI assigned to their card loaded with IT Mode software/Firmware) with the 9207-8i hardware but loaded with one of the RAID versions of software/firmware (which would have given it a different LIS part number), you have been a victim of deceptive advertising.

Hi Frank, thanks for this info.

Background why i was asking:

I want do change my both very old Adaptec's (from 2008/2011) to only one controller.

I did some research to find out if there could be problems. In the course of this, I found some reviews that described an extremely slow boot process, but it was not mentioned if that concerns the IT-mode.

But it seems, there is all ok with this controllertype and i can use it without risks.

Thanks again for your help