Recommended supported SATA Cards?

[Rob]

I've seen the SYBA SY-PEX40008, but would prefer to have a PCI-e 4x 
connector for the bandwidth and avoid a port multiplier if possible. 
Since this will be in a ZFS pool, I'd prefer not to have 1 bad port take 
out more than 1 disk. :)  I have seen the Sil3124 chipset mentioned 
before in my searches and wasn't sure of its level of support either so 
it's nice to know that chipset is well supported.  Does the siis driver 
support offlining and swapping hard disks without rebooting?


The Adaptec 1430SA seems to use a Marvell chipset according to some 
searching of the freebsd archives:
http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/current/2005-10/0389.html
http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/stable/2005-11/0441.html
http://old.nabble.com/Adaptec-1405-on-FreeBSD-td26337538.html

But Adaptec's own site/documentation doesn't want to confirm it for me. 
  The best I've come up with is:
http://ask.adaptec.com/scripts/adaptec_tic.cfg/php.exe/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=12177&p_created=1098385883&p_sid=1tiW_K3k&p_accessibility=0&p_redirect=&p_lva=438&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PWRmbHQ6MSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MjE5LDIxOSZwX3Byb2RzPTQ1JnBfY2F0cz0mcF9wdj0xLjQ1JnBfY3Y9JnBfc2VhcmNoX3R5cGU9YW5zd2Vycy5zZWFyY2hfbmwmcF9wYWdlPTE*&p_li=&p_topview=1

I've found a commit that mentions support for the 1430SA:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-src-stable-8/2009-November/000565.html

But I'm not sure what the state of the support is or how stable it is 
with that driver (looks to be ata?)

If the 1430SA uses the Marvell chipset (as it appears to), then I guess 
the question comes down to the level of support for the Marvell 88SX6541 
and 88SX7042 chipsets.

Anyone know the current state of functionality for the above Marvell 
chipsets?

Rob

On 06/30/2010 09:07 AM, Steve Polyack wrote:
> On 06/29/10 16:58, Rob wrote:
>> I've been trying to find a PCI-e SATA II (300MB/s) controller card for
>> a FreeBSD 8.0 system, but am having problems determining if FreeBSD
>> 8.0 will support them. Ideally I'd like to find one that is not a HW
>> Raid controller, as I don't need that functionality since I place to
>> use ZFS and the HW Raid on the card just gets in the way. I know that
>> a HighPoint RocketRAID 23x0 (2310, 2320) will work with the htprr
>> driver, but those are HW RAID cards.
>>
>> I've found 'Adaptec 2241000-R 1430SA' and 'Rosewill RC-218' cards, and
>> those are the ones I'm having a hard time telling if FreeBSD supports.
>> Searching of the e-mail archives has given me mixed results and
>> nothing definitive to say that they work.
>>
>> I'm not sure what chipset the Adaptec 2241000-R 1430SA uses, but the
>> Rosewill uses the Marvell 88SX7042 chipset. I'd prefer to use Adaptec
>> if possible as in the past they produced good SCSI boards and used to
>> be well supported (in Linux anyway), but I'll use the Rosewill if it's
>> well supported in FreeBSD. It's also possible Adaptec has taken a hit
>> in support/quality since I last used one of their boards. :)
>>
> I think the Marvell SATA chipset work is still a work-in-progress. It
> may still be supported by the ata(4) driver, but that driver typically
> does not support any SATA-specific features, such as NCQ.
>
>> Does anyone know if the above boards are supported in FreeBSD? Anyone
>> have any recommendations for PCI-e 4x SATA controllers with a minimum
>> of 4 internal connectors?
>
> We use a handful of the SYBA SY-PEX40008 cards
> (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124027) to
> manage a handful of drives with ZFS. The cards have some RAID features,
> but you can simply plug disks in and use them without involving the RAID
> layer. If your motherboard supports it, you can even disable the Option
> ROM from showing up on boot.
>
> Overall, the performance has been pretty good. The siis(4) driver has
> full support for the Sil3124 chipset that these use and supports all of
> the bells & whistles like NCQ and FIS-based switching for port
> multipliers. They have also been very stable. The only gripe for me is
> that it's only 1x PCI-E, instead of 4x, so you won't get full
> performance out of it once you have 4 fast drives attached.
>
>
>>
>> Rob
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>
>
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