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Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:48:44 -0400
From: Steve Polyack <korvus@comcast.net>
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Subject: FreeBSD and SATA Port Multipliers
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I have a system running FreeBSD 8.0-RC1 that contains 3x Sil3124 PCI-E 
SATA controller cards.  Each card has 3x Sil3726 Port Multipliers 
attached (5 slots per SATA PM).  The problem is that the disks are often 
not all detected by FreeBSD, even though the controller Option ROMs list 
all of the installed physical disks.  Which drive(s) are not detected 
seems to vary with each boot.  All of the port multipliers are detected 
every boot, it's just the drives which aren't getting probed.

I've tried the following patch, 
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/129784 , which may have 
helped - it picks up 6-8 out of 9 disks, but obviously that's not 
ideal.  The motherboard BIOS version is current, as is the firmware for 
the SATA controllers.

Does anyone have any ideas or other patches that I may try?


Thanks,
Steve Polyack