SGI: Hardware

This is premature but I'm too excited to wait. There's a bunch of LSI 3041X-R cards floating around here for around $25. So what the heck, it's an LSI 1064 chip, can't hurt to try.

Came, looks like a fake with a used LSI chip in the middle - either that or LSI product quality has gone down seriously. Tested it in an x86 kompewter first just in case


and

The hex 1000, device 0050 is the LSI sata/sas card. I don't have a drive to check it with yet but this could be a low-cost answer to the ide-sata-no-scsi-dvdrw-expensive scsi disk problem on the 3xxx platforms, anyhow.

Btw, when did they change reporting an IEEE1394 disk into being a "Fabric Disk" on the wrong controller ? Seems a little strange.

Stay tuned for the further adventures of Dick and Jane ....

Update :



Been a week now, didn't do to-the-death testing but pushed the disk pretty hard, seems reliable and don't see any noticeable speed differences in operation from the 15k scsi disks. Set ioconfig.conf aside and rebooted, Irix re-ordered my hardware inventory to make more sense. Kinda liked having a Fabric Disk for a while tho.

SATA CD-ROM has some problems tho That was one of my major interests in this whole exercise. Grrr.

Four stars .

==========

Now for something completely different - another compatible piece of hardware : Apple iTouch. No, it doesn't do anything but out of six computers in the office, my Fool is the only one that will charge it thru the USB. Weird

Moderator Edit <recondas>: Split from the Fuel Hardware Aggregator <after the appropriate content was aggregated>.

thorias wrote: ....Maybe with a SATA DVD drive and the LSI SAS3442X-R 8-port SAS/SATA HBA....

Can you try this please before your Fool goes away ? (Really nice one, by the way.) A sata dvd-writer shows up properly here but doesn't work

Edit : tried an Addonics SATA-to-CF converter, which would have solved a lot of memory stick problems with the Fool. Unfortunately it was a miserable failure. At least the DVD writer was recognized ...

Well, looks like the unit is a pos, not even reliable under Windows. So perhaps there is hope for the future.

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/reader ... =6007-9392

I was scanning through some of the documentaion for the flash utility for the LSI SAS boards and noticed the LSI SAS3800X on the list of LSI SAS1064/1068 based HBAs. The LSI SAS3800X has eight external SAS/SATA ports <via two SFF8470 connectors>. The Data Sheet for the SAS3800X also mentions that it uses the IRIX/IP35 supported LSI SAS1068 controller.

There's always a risk in being the first to try anything, but based on the reported success with the SAS3442X(-R) and the SAS3041X-R, it *ought* to work. The SAS3800X might be a nice solution for someone with limited internal expansion <Origin 3xx(x)?> to whom the external only ports would be an advantage. Eight 1TB SATA drives in an XVM array would be interesting <or two four-drive/4TB mirrors>.



If someone wants to try the SAS3800X, there's an currently a listing for more than 10, "factory sealed" SAS3800Xs with a buy-it-now price of $95: http://cgi.ebay.com/LSI-LOGIC-SAS3800X- ... 18Q2el1247

recondas wrote: The SAS3800X might be a nice solution for someone with limited internal expansion <Origin 3xx(x)?> to whom the external only ports would be an advantage. Eight 1TB SATA drives in an XVM array would be interesting <or two four-drive/4TB mirrors>.

That's a great find! I'm reasonably sure it will work too - just a matter of how the ports are routed more than anything else.

Hi, finally got around to installing an SAS3041X-R card in my Fuel, after futzing around getting it seated it worked fine as well. Stuffed a 200GB Western Digital IDE drive through an IDE->SATA bridge (picked up a couple for $10 each) and everything worked great, GUI tools found, initialized, and mounted the drive like it was a standard SCSI drive. A+++++++, would try again!

Finally, a use for the odds-and-sods IDE drives I have around here. The card is probably the 'same' as the one's Hamei found, albiet with some cross ocean markup. Still, seemed to work fine though.

What's the model number of the IDE/SATA bridge? And how does a diskperf run on the drive?

Also, would the SAS3041XL-S work ok aswell?

Ian.

mapesdhs wrote: Also, would the SAS3041XL-S work ok aswell?

As long as has either the LSISAS1064 or LSISAS1068 chipset it should work - I didn't see a specific mention of the SAS3041XL-S nomenclature on LSI's site. You might want to confirm it's the correct height profile, the "L" in the product name might mean it's equipped with a L ow-profile bracket? <though it looks like the retail version comes with both the low and normal height brackets>.

For reference, here's a photo of the one I have: and here's a closeup of the LSISAS1064 chip:

EDIT: Found this eBay listing for a SAS3041XL-S, and it appears to be identical to the one pictured above - it's referred to as an SAS3041X-R farther down in the listing, so the XL-S probably for marketing purposes to identify what's included and how it's packaged <I suspect that on is in OEM rather than retail form>.

Yes, it's low profile. Infact it looks identical to your picture. Thanks!!

Ian.

Yep, that's the one I got from that eBay vendor. The full-height bracket didn't quite 'fit' properly, but a bit of bending got it to work. Not a show stopper by any means.

Drive is a Western Digital WD200 200 GB IDE disk, not sure offhand if it's the 2MB or the 8MB cache version (would have to pull things apart to check now) and made in 2004 - so one might argue that the latest crop of SATA disks should run much faster. In any regard however, here is the diskperf run on it:


Bit inconsistent on the read speeds, but one could probably argue that given the vintage nature of the disk that 45 MB/sec is probably close to the areal transfer rate of the drive, and again a modern zoomy SATA drive would probably double that.

As for the SATA->IDE adapter, it's one of those 'bidirectional' ones. Looks like it uses the SATALink SPIF223A chipset, board is labelled RXD639 Rev 1.2 2008-10, blister pack is labelled " IDE to SATA or SARA to IDE Adpter " (typo's as shown) - but in order to get clearance with the wind turbine housing in the Fuel had to use a right-angle SATA cable and not the one that came with it. I'd guess that probably any of the SATA->IDE bridge-boards would work OK and would have less clearance issues. Camera is on charge, will try to post some pics up later.

As I noted before, once the Fuel booted up and found everything, the disk truly acted just like a standard SCSI disk with all of the GUI disk admin tools. No futzing with crazy mount paths. So far it's been working fine.

Looks like the drive is an 8-meg cache version:

For the WD2000 J B drive, the ' J ' indicates the larger cache memory.

And credit where credit is due, thanks for the heads up Hamei!

Thanks for all the info! This certainly opens up a much greater range of storage possibilities. I wonder how XLV
would fair with a bunch of modern drives on one of these? Hmm...

Ian.

nekonoko did a few diskperf tests with a SATA drive <connected to a LSI SAS3442X-R> and posted the results here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=14309&p=112922&#p112922

The following is a list of PCI-X SAS/SATA host bus adapters based on the LSI SAS1064 and LSI SAS1068 controllers supported by IRIX on the Fuel and other IP35 platforms. The list was gathered from the SAS HBA section of LSI's web site :

- LSI SAS3041X-R: 4 ports; all internal via four individual SATA connections.

- LSI SAS3442X(-R):

mapesdhs wrote: I'm surprised your SCSI numbers are so bad. I get much better than that:.

I don't doubt it. But in this case I wasn't interested in winning the Benchmark Trophy, I just wanted to see what I could expect from the sata drive. Probably had ten applications running during those tests ... I was trying to simulate the real world. Or as close as it can get to Shanghai.

Initially I expected the sata drive to come off very second-best. I planned to put all my applications and short-term storage on the scsi boot drive and just use the sata drive for big junk that I don't access so often.

Turned out I didn't need to do that. I still try to keep the apps centralized down on the boot drive but it's not necessary. Things run just as fast and transfers are just as speedy from the sata drive.

ymmv

One thing I was told from a guy at a local Novell office was that it's definitely worth trying to nab a SATA 10K.
They replaced the disk in their winblows server with such a drive and it turned into a speed-boot demon.

The LSI card I was watching ended a bit high for me (and why the heck did the seller have to end the auction
at 4:39am??), but there are others.

Ian.

hamei wrote: While you're in there, Stranded - try a SATA CD-ROM or DVD-writer. Didn't work for me but wondering if that's my own fault ? I tried a Pioneer.

Did you change the firmware of the LSI card? I noticed this bit in man(1m) lsflash:

I checked SupportFolio, but the only LSI firmware I could find (LSI_fw_1_03_21.tar.gz) was for 4GB FC boards

I don't have any SATA optical drives, but if it doesn't work for you, you might consider flashing the board with the latest firmware from lsi.com.

jan-jaap wrote:

hamei wrote: While you're in there, Stranded - try a SATA CD-ROM or DVD-writer. Didn't work for me but wondering if that's my own fault ? I tried a Pioneer.

Did you change the firmware of the LSI card?

As far as removable media drives go, jj is probably correct - the devil may lie in the details <of the firmware>. There is a specific setting in the LSI firmware that enables/disables removable media support. From the "readme" file that comes with the LSI firmware update:
and the 'Field Description' for the 'Removable Media Support' field:
If you're going to flash the firmware you might try checking the firmware/BIOS settings while it's in the PC <but that has all the hallmarks of "too good to be true".......>

Hi there,

Unfortunately my PC only has 32bit 5Volt PCI slots so my LSI SAS board does not physically fit as it is a 3.3Volt board and the keying is different.
(I think I'll see about getting another cheap PC motherboard and enabling the "removable media" option via that)

And also, if I have the firmware image from LSI, can I use the "lsflash" utility in IRIX to do the upgrade ?

Mark

strandedinnz wrote: if I have the firmware image from LSI, can I use the "lsflash" utility in IRIX to do the upgrade?

Don't know of anyone who's tried it. Your call, but that's a lot of unknowns to roll together during a firmware flash... firmware intended for use on an intel box, IRIX flash utility, and an HP OEM'd version of the LSI SAS card.......

recondas wrote:

strandedinnz wrote: if I have the firmware image from LSI, can I use the "lsflash" utility in IRIX to do the upgrade?

Don't know of anyone who's tried it. Your call, but that's a lot of unknowns to roll together during a firmware flash... firmware intended for use on an intel box, IRIX flash utility, and an HP OEM'd version of the LSI SAS card.......

I considered it, but the I downloaded the LSI firmware update, and (1) it's actually two components whereas SGI only uses lsi1064.fw, and (2) one of these components comes in two flavors, depending on chip revision. Too risky for me.