SAS card for G5Quad

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Hi everyone 🙂.
May be it's old news here for all of you.. But I've just got SAS (Serial Attached SCSI 😀 ) controller, which natively detected & shown in System Profiler in my PowerMac. It's LSI SAS3041E-R. All I've done with it - just unpacked, mounted in slot & powered up mac. When it all booted - checked System Profiler. And here it is 😀. Will attach some pics here 🙂. Well, I;ve personnaly got something to do with next step - find some empty drives & connect them to controller. (Not to mention about how & where to put drives in mac 😀 ). (Excuse my terriful english, feel free to correct me 🙂 ). Controller price was really nothing - around 8-9 $ in russian rubles 😀.

 

[NikolaPPC]

Will LSI LOGIC L3-25121-61A also work?
It is available in my country for cheap, and I could buy it if it is compatible 😀


Cheers, Nikola!

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Can't say for sure. Ask vendor if the board ships with drivers for mac, especially old one 🙂. LSI boards are quite versatile & work in many OSes.

BTW, I've connected former USB HDD 2,5" (from external box), which was used for TimeMachne backups (just dropped it inplace of DVD for tests). Hey, I like THAT drive icon far more than ordinary USB 😀.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Thread UP ! 🙂
Got that nice little cage for SAS\SATA hdd\ssd. (EXEGATE HS425-01). Any height drives fit (mine are 12,7 mm). Installed 4 SAS drives (Seagate Savvio, 600Gb each). Inserted & started all this 🙂. System started OK (after I;ve resitted second videocard, R7 X360, for amdgpu experiments in Linux). Now cleaning drives with dd 😀.

 

[TzunamiOSX]

Thread UP ! 🙂
Got that nice little cage for SAS\SATA hdd\ssd. (EXEGATE HS425-01). Any height drives fit (mine are 12,7 mm). Installed 4 SAS drives (Seagate Savvio, 600Gb each). Inserted & started all this 🙂. System started OK (after I;ve resitted second videocard, R7 X360, for amdgpu experiments in Linux). Now cleaning drives with dd 😀.

Why not something like this? Up to 6 2,5" drives in the 2 G5 Bays. Sorry read it to late, your drives are 12,7mm.

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[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Excuse me, I don't read\understand german language 🙂. And you're found that drives ARE fat 😀. That box fits really well instead of CD\dvd and the controller itself is 4-port. Perect fit\match, I'm happy as an elephant (russian saying 😀 ).

 

[Amethyst1]

Installed 4 SAS drives (Seagate Savvio, 600Gb each).

Sounds good. Now I want to play with such a setup too...

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Confirmed - SAS controller IS bootable. The biggest trouble was to find recordable media for Leopard installer. USB flash drives fail to boot & DVD image is for DL disk, which is not the tging I could find nearby 🙂. Got restricted disk image & installed from FW DVD.
Now migrating data afrom SATA Leo installation.

 

[TzunamiOSX]

My plan is to install 3 SSDs or 4 HGST 7mm 2,5" Harddisks inside my G5 as RAID 5 (with linked adapter)

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Question. I've tried to transfer Mac OS Tiger from built-in SATA drive to SAS drive, where Leopard now lives (with Carbon Copy Cloner). Got unbootable system ("still waiting for root device"). It is obvious, that Tiger don't have required drivers for my SAS controller. Is there any place where I can look for them? (BTW, there are no section about SAS in Tiger's System Profiler). The second question is - how to install Tiger on such type of hardware, if I'll find drivers? 🙂

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Got another one SAS card, now it's PCI-X based. It has FCode rom onboard, so I suppose OF have to detect card itself. (I don't know about macos 9, but in my Quad Tiger didn't got friver for this card, only Tiger Server & Leopard have them). This is some info to prove existence of FCode ROM 😀.

root@debian:~/LSIUtil_1.62/Linux# ./lsiutil.x86_64 -p2

LSI Logic MPT Configuration Utility, Version 1.62, January 14, 2009

3 MPT Ports found

Port Name Chip Vendor/Type/Rev MPT Rev Firmware Rev IOC
2. /proc/mpt/ioc1 LSI Logic SAS1064 A3 105 011a0000 0

1. Identify firmware, BIOS, and/or FCode
2. Download firmware (update the FLASH)
4. Download/erase BIOS and/or FCode (update the FLASH)
8. Scan for devices
10. Change IOC settings (interrupt coalescing)
13. Change SAS IO Unit settings
16. Display attached devices
20. Diagnostics
21. RAID actions
22. Reset bus
23. Reset target
42. Display operating system names for devices
45. Concatenate SAS firmware and NVDATA files
59. Dump PCI config space
60. Show non-default settings
61. Restore default settings
66. Show SAS discovery errors
69. Show board manufacturing information
97. Reset SAS link, HARD RESET
98. Reset SAS link
99. Reset port
e Enable expert mode in menus
p Enable paged mode
w Enable logging

Main menu, select an option: [1-99 or e/p/w or 0 to quit] 1

Current active firmware version is 011a0000 (1.26.00)
Firmware image's version is MPTFW-01.26.00.00-IE
LSI Logic
x86 BIOS image's version is MPTBIOS-6.24.00.00 (2008.07.01)
FCode image's version is MPT SAS FCode Version 1.00.40 (2006.03.02)

 

[flyproductions]

Confirmed - SAS controller IS bootable.

Sounds good!

Did you do any benchmarks of a single (SSD-)drive?

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Did you do any benchmarks of a single (SSD-)drive?

You're one year late 😀. No, I didn't. Main reason for installation of SAS controller was low drive capacity of G5 🙂. As for now - it stays unoperational (cooling system troubles I think). (I hope I'll find someone who can fix it may be for reasonable price.)

 

[flyproductions]

You're one year late 😀. No, I didn't. Main reason for installation of SAS controller was low drive capacity of G5 🙂.

Ah, so, as they come really affordable, i ordered one yesterday and will have a look myself.

As for now - it stays unoperational (cooling system troubles I think).

Quite common. I just redid mine recently. Checked the cooling blocks for debrid (which was surprisingly little) and refilled the liquid. Last time i did this was ten years ago. So was about time. Good thing is, for the Quads the build quality is alot better as for the 2.5/2.7. So leakage isn't that much of a problem. This time i even changed the thermal compound of the northbridge on the back of the mainboard and cleaned all the fans. But now it's like new again.

(I hope I'll find someone who can fix it may be for reasonable price.)

Sadly i'm afraid, i am a bit to far away. 😉 But all this isn't as difficult as it looks at the first glance.

 

[Amethyst1]

Ah, so, as they come really affordable, i ordered one yesterday and will have a look myself.

So did I, but I’ll be testing it via Thunderbolt with a 2011 MBP — because I can 😀

 

[flyproductions]

So did I, but I’ll be testing it via Thunderbolt with a 2011 MBP — because I can 😀

Ok, i could also plug it into one of the Pros. But wouldn't make any sense as they are not as limited as the PPCs. I think, even the crappy SATA II ports wouldn't be so much slower per drive. But we will see. 😉

 

[ervus]

Ah, so, as they come really affordable, i ordered one yesterday and will have a look myself.

Please let us know what you find out! I've been looking for a bootable 64-bit PCI card that will work in a G4. There are a variety of used PC cards for sale, but almost no drivers or info on compatibility for us. There are different RAID cards too, but same problem...

 

[ifrit05]

I just bought an SAS3041XL-S PCI-X card that came from a SPARCserver (runs OF), so presumably should be bootable. We'll see.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

PCI-X card that came from a SPARCserver (runs OF)

You can dig a bit in OF-shell, there definitely have to be something about PCI & LSI.

 

[flyproductions]

Please let us know what you find out! I've been looking for a bootable 64-bit PCI card that will work in a G4. There are a variety of used PC cards for sale, but almost no drivers or info on compatibility for us. There are different RAID cards too, but same problem...

Sorry, but, if you are on a G4, it will not help you much. This card is PCIe. But even if you find one which is PCI, you are almost always limited by the bandwidth of the 33MHz PCI. In G4s with the well known SIL3112 SATA controller i never get anymore than max about 60MB/s. With single disks which easily make 130 even at the G5's SATA I. So a RAID with one card in a G4 will not make any sense. Aside what's been said about booting of RAIDs elsewhere.

 

[ervus]

The card pictured above is PCI-X, and sometimes these are backwards compatible with 64 and 32-bit PCI. I've seen 64-bit PCI cards go over 220MB/s (of a theoretical 267MB/s) in G4 PowerMAcs, but I have not personally been able to find one that's bootable.

RAID is not usually about raw speed anyway, but rather fault tolerance and disk size. Some documentation I've seen for RAID cards have a "pass through" mode that lets one or more drives appear to the OS unmodified, and the RAID hardware handles the others. This is to let you boot on the "pass through" drive and then load the driver for the RAID. But I don't know if this would work on PPC. Most plain SATA cards are not bootable without the right firmware.

forums.macrumors.com/threads/post-your-ssd-cf-sata-pata-powerpc-benchmark-results.2063361/

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Some documentation I've seen for RAID cards have a "pass through" mode that lets one or more drives appear to the OS unmodified, and the RAID hardware handles the others.

This is called "JBOD" ("Just a Bunch Of Disks"). Not all SAS RAID supports this feature, it's better to examine a bit controller documentation. Personally I don't know ways to create RAIDs at pre-OS phase of PowerMacs startup. This cards works a bit differently & don't show some kind of user interface, like on PCs. I suppose card user have to look for RAID software online (or perhaps on disks, if they included with card 🙂 ). If controller is RAID-only - uh oh, you definitely need software, otherwise OS wouldn't detect drives at all. (This is one of reasons why I prefer HBA cards).

 

[flyproductions]

The card pictured above is PCI-X, and sometimes these are backwards compatible with 64 and 32-bit PCI. I've seen 64-bit PCI cards go over 220MB/s (of a theoretical 267MB/s) in G4 PowerMAcs, but I have not personally been able to find one that's bootable.

Even if you would find such a card, i still don't get the point to run a RAID with it. Every modern SSD reaches 220MB/s easily. And for random transactions on smaller files they are faster than the RAID anyway. And, for what's used in a G4, disk size shouldn't be a concern nowadyas.

 

[flyproductions]

forums.macrumors.com/threads/post-your-ssd-cf-sata-pata-powerpc-benchmark-results.2063361/

Sadly in fact most of the results posted are Xbench.

Sadly because i really don't give a fu** on what Xbench says. It is not even capable of reading my machines bus-speed right. Graphics tests are a complete mess with Radeon 9800 pros sometimes falling back behind Radeon 7500. And so is the disk test. I'm quite sure, QuickBench delivering the much more reliable "real life like" stuff.

Please compare these two results of the same SSD on the same card on the same PCIe slot in the same machine: A 500GB SAMSUNG 850evo on the OWC Accelsior S card in the Quad G5:

Xbench 1.3

QuickBench 4.0

Note that QuickBench returning nearly triple the speed for the exact same 256k random uncached reads as Xbench does. For 4k the difference is lower but still at 50%. And on the sequential side things look even worse! The bigger the blocks get, the more Xbench messes things up.

And i also don't get it's scoring-algorythm. See this result, you posted and compare it to the one above:

Note that anything but the (fake!) 256k read values is significantly higher in the upper one. That doesn't prevent Xbench from giving a more than 100 points higher overall result for the lower one.

So let's compare speeds/benchmarks. But let's not use Xbench!

 

[ervus]

You are right, xbench 1.3 results look different than xbench 1.1.3 results. My point was that 64-bit PCI cards are enough of an improvement over 32-bit ones (and IDE) that it's worthwhile to look for one that's bootable.