Do you recommend Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 as PCI-X SATA controller?

[DarkSoul]

Hello,

I used this card for my personal ZFS NAS (2 cards, 15 disks + 1 SSD).

http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SAT2-MV8.cfm

Frankly speaking, this card will work 99% of the time. But it has a few
quirks :
- Sometimes, I've had a port drop because maybe of a broken/dying disk.
  The port would NOT recover unless I cold rebooted the server.
  And a port not recovering means, even the BIOS option ROM programming
won't find it.
  Quite annoying as one could guess.
- I could panic a system by removing a drive (back in the 8.1-RELEASE
days) because of thread locking/sleeping issues.
- I don't know what is to blame for that but :
 - I had more than once odd queue issues and disks flapping. Not really
a problem with ZFS but VERY irritating nonetheless.
 - I even had a whole controller drop on me once. Nothing a reboot/zpool
scrub couldn't fix (with NO corruption to boot!) but still...
 - It really, REALLY doesn't play nice with other cards. I tried
migrating progressively to mpt(4) cards, with a one by one switch, only
to experience stray NMIs and pretty ugly kernel panics. It turned out
having a "pure" system with two f the same kind (mind, I was not pairing
PCI-X and PCIe, this was in every case pure PCI-X setups) did wonders
for stability.

It's probably fairly decent for most home purposes (my main use),
but I'd advise against it in any serious environment.

Cheers,

On 04/04/2012 10:52 PM, Moritz Wilhelmy wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm going to purchase a PCI-X SATA controller card for an NFS server.
> Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 looks good with it's 8 SATA connectors.
>
> Before purchasing, and as my last inquiry, I wanted to make sure that
> this particular card is well-supported by FreeBSD.
>
> According to what I've seen in the list archives, it seems to work (with
> occasional issues). Is there anything else to keep in mind?
>
> Best regards,
>
>     Moritz
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-- 
Stephane LAPIE, EPITA SRS, Promo 2005
"Even when they have digital readouts, I can't understand them."
--MegaTokyo


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