HBA Areca 1320 not working, obsolete driver, what can I do?

[mmenaz]

Hi, for ZFS and Ceph I was looking for a "non raid controller" card that can manage sas connectors and boxes. I've lost time with Adaptec JBOD (can't boot from JBOD) and with IBM/LSI M1015 (not easy to find in my country, was unable to crossflash).
I've found Areca 1320-8i that looked perfect and officially supported by Linux, but only after having ordered 2 (sigh) when I tested it I've find that I can't write to the disk, I get tons of error and can't even partition them (also with systemrescuecd and gparted).
Something like "failed command: WRITE FPDMA QUEUED" or also "Buffer I/O error on dev sda, logical block XYZ, lost async page write".
I've seen that the mvsas drivers that come with proxmox are 0.8.16 (and also in systemrescuecd or recent Ubuntu)
while on areca site there is 1.1.10
http://www.areca.com.tw/support/s_linux/nonraid_linux.htm
I ask: could you please provide those up-to-date drivers (also possibly in the next iso released)?
And for now, since I wanted to install in a zfs raid10 with 4 disks, how can I add those drivers during Proxmox installation?
Maybe I just should give up from ZFS and Ceph and rely only to usual raid controllers with cache and bbu? Seems a minefield to me! (and no, LSI cards that can be flashed in IT mode are not easy to find in my country, no resellers that have them available).
Any help is much apreciated

 

[sigxcpu]

eBay has Dell H200 at ~80$. Did you pay less for Arecas? I'm asking that because LSI-based controllers are best supported in all OSes.

 

[vkhera]

I'm using LSI 9300-4i SAS controller on my PVE 4.0 machines and it works really well. The whole system is ZFS for boot + data. The boot drives are SSD's attached to the motherboard (Supermicro) SATA, and the 4x seagate SAS drives connected to the LSI.

 

[mmenaz]

I pay more for Areca, but we need to have a supplier we can rely, so we don't buy from eBay but from our usual suppliers, that don't have "pure" LSI.
If you get a rebranded LSI, you can't *easily* crossflash to LSI-IT mode, I've tried with a IBM 46M0861 that is a LSI SAS9220-8i based, but I wasted a lot of time and failed.

 

[mmenaz]

No cache SSD (L2ARC and ZIL)? What pveperf FSYNCS/SECOND and seek time indexes do you get with your setup? What segate SAS model? Thanks