Re: M2 NVME support

From: andy thomas <andy_at_time-domain.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2023 20:46:35 UTC
On Thu, 13 Apr 2023, Thierry Thomas wrote:

> Le jeu. 13 avr. 23 ? 13:25:36 +0200, egoitz@ramattack.net <egoitz@ramattack.net>
> ?crivait :
>
>> Hi!,
>
> Hello,
>
>> We are in the process of buying new hardware for use with FreeBSD and
>> ZFS. We are planning whether to buy M2 NVME disks or just SATA SSD disks
>> (probably Samsung PM* ones). How is you experience with them?. Do you
>> recommend one over the another?. Is perhaps better support from some of
>> them from a specificic version to newer?. Or do they perhaps work better
>> with some specific disk controller?.
>
> I have a bad experience, the problem seems to be caused by the driver.
>
> See <https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=270409>.

I thought I would mention I have been using a WD Blue SA510 250GB M2 NVME 
SSD mounted on a PCIe to NVME adapter card under FBSD 13.1 for some months 
now with no problems or any special drivers being installed.

The server is a Dell PowerEdge 430 1U server fitted with four SATA disks 
in a ZFS pool, with a 4 GB partition on each disk being used for the swap 
(since using SSDs for swap space can wear them out quite quickly).

Attached is a screenshot showing FreeBSD version, the NVME SSD type, 
mounted SSD partitions, the server make & model and some info about the 
spinning disks too (there is a known issue with the built-in Megaraid 
driver in the FreeBSD 13.1 kernel not working with the camcontrol utility 
nor converting disk device names like /dev/mfisyspd0 to traditional names 
such as /dev/ada0 but these controllers & disks do work with FBSD 13.1 
as you cna see from the zpool output).

Andy

----------------------------
Andy Thomas,
Time Domain Systems

Tel: +44 (0)7866 556626
http://www.time-domain.co.uk