Adaptec 6805H single in a Linux server

In order to extend the amount of SATA disk in my server I decided to use the Adaptec 6805H single Host Bus Adapter (which converts from PCI-E bus to SAS/SATA bus :-)). The device uses a PMC PM80xx chipset. SAS is backward compatible to SATA, one can connect up to 4 devices on a SAS port on this device. The BIOS is not very fast, however my four SATA disks were recognized without any problem. Also, the Ubuntu 13.04 Linux Kernel detected the card with the PCI-ID 9005:8081 using the module pm80xx. Rebuilding of a RAID5 consisting of 4 WD Red 3TB disks went reasonable fast with approximately 130MB/sec. So far, I can recommend that controller for Linux users!
Rebuilding the array:

md127 : active raid5 sdb1[4] sdc1[1] sda1[0] sdd1[2]
      8790402048 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [UUU_]
      [=>...................]  recovery =  5.0% (149344844/2930134016) finish=366.0min speed=126601K/sec

Ouput of lspci:

02:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: Adaptec PMC-Sierra PM8001 SAS HBA [Series 6H] (rev 05)
 Subsystem: Adaptec Device 0800
 Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr+ Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B- DisINTx+
 Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
 Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 32 bytes
 Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 16
 Region 0: Memory at fe5f0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
 Region 2: Memory at fe5e0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
 Region 4: Memory at fe5d0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
 Region 5: Memory at fe580000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
 Expansion ROM at fe400000 [disabled] [size=1M]
 Capabilities: <access denied>
 Kernel driver in use: pm80xx

Leave a Comment