CentOS - Mar 2012 - LSI 2008 SAS driver?

Can anyone tell me which versions of CentOS/kernel support the LSI 2008
SAS chipset, as used in the Supermicro X8DT6-F motherboard?

It's billed as a "hardware RAID" controller. Is this real RAID or
fake RAID?
I will be having two hard drives in a mirrored configuration. I usually
use MD software RAID1, mirroring at the partition level. Would this still
be best with this chipset, or would hardware RAID1 mirroring be better?

Anything else I should watch out for?

I'm also interested in whether it's even worthwhile going for the SAS
rather than just sticking to SATA drives with AHCI.

Thanks in advance for any comments!

Tony
-- 
Tony Mountifield
Work: tony at softins.co.uk - http://www.softins.co.uk
Play: tony at mountifield.org - http://tony.mountifield.org

On 03/23/12 5:04 AM, Tony Mountifield wrote:
> Can anyone tell me which versions of CentOS/kernel support the LSI 2008
> SAS chipset, as used in the Supermicro X8DT6-F motherboard?
>
> It's billed as a "hardware RAID" controller. Is this real
RAID or fake RAID?
> I will be having two hard drives in a mirrored configuration. I usually
> use MD software RAID1, mirroring at the partition level. Would this still
> be best with this chipset, or would hardware RAID1 mirroring be better?
the MPT2SAS driver for those chips should be in c5.recent and most 
definitely are in C6

its 'real' hardware reid, but doesn't have significant cache or any 
battery or flash backup, so its hardly worth using the raid.  I 
configure these as simple JBOD and let Linux do the mirroring.



-- 
john r pierce                            N 37, W 122
santa cruz ca                         mid-left coast