Home / server / Questions / 675253
Accepted
user
Asked: 2015-03-14 04:42:01 +0800 CST

Does the LSI 9211-8i add any data structures of its own when used in pure HBA (JBOD) mode?

  • 772

I'm looking at adding some disks to one of my systems, for which I need to add an offboard HBA. Looking around, I came across the LSI MegaRAID SAS 9211-8i (LSI part number LSI00194) which looks quite interesting. LSI also seem to be popular in general, including right here.

Since I run ZFS, I plan on using the HBA itself as just a dumb controller, letting ZFS handle everything related to storage-level redundancy and recovery. The host OS is Linux (Debian/Linux to be precise).

While I doubt LSI will stop producing these cards any time soon, it would still be nice to know: does the 9211-8i add any data structures of its own to the disks when used in JBOD mode? In other words, can I unplug a disk from the 9211-8i, plug it into an alternate HBA, and everything "just keeps working"? Or will the OS then see some form of garbage on the disk that is not exposed through the LSI, which might interfere with ZFS' usage of the volume?

storage

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    No. The disks are raw and portable when used with a pure SAS HBA like the LSI-9211. There's no RAID metadata involved here.

    Also see: ZFS SAS/SATA controller recommendations

    • 2

  2. If you flash these SAS HBA to IT mode they behave like normal SATA controllers. You can switch any time.

    • 0