Running FreeBSD on M.2 SSD

[Paul Mather]

On Feb 25, 2020, at 9:03 AM, Daniel Kalchev <daniel at digsys.bg> wrote:


> FreeBSD does not technically have driver for different disks. People asked whether it is an NVMe device or SATA device, because those interfaces have different drivers.
> 
> But for FreeBSD, an mechanical SATA, hybrid SATA or SSD SATA will use exactly the same SATA driver. It depends on the chipset.
> 
> It is possible however, that the timing between the drive and the SATA controller might be different and that is causing the problem.


In a similar vein, I had an old MacBook Pro 2011 model.  Its SATA chipset would negotiate SATA III speeds but any disk I/O at that speed would soon lead to widespread data corruption.  SATA II drives and slower would be fine: no corruption.

The funny thing was that this wasn't an issue when I used earlier versions of macOS: the problem only seemed to manifest when I "upgraded" to Mojave (IIRC).  I surmised that maybe at that time period, whatever quirks or workarounds in the earlier OS versions no longer applied, and so whatever had caused the SATA III replacement drive to work (e.g., by force-negotiating at the slower speed) no longer did. :-(

So, maybe a quirk/workaround that is in Linux and Windows but not in FreeBSD for you hardware *might* be a possibility?

Cheers,

Paul.