Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:06:27 +0200 From: Moritz Wilhelmy <mw+fbsd@dennis.cs.uni-saarland.de> To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: PCI-X SATA (non HW-RAID) controller recommendation Message-ID: <20120417110627.GE22863@emile.cs.uni-saarland.de> In-Reply-To: <20120409203219.155060@gmx.com> References: <20120409203219.155060@gmx.com>
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Hi again,
First off, sorry for the huge delay.
On Mon, Apr 09, 2012 at 16:32:17 -0400, Dieter BSD wrote:
> Moritz writes:
> >> Can you (or someone else for that matter) recommend any decent PCI-X
> >> controller for use in "serious environments"
>
> >> I heard Silicon Image cards are supposed to be good?
>
> > Just wondering, do you (or anyone else) know whether there are PCI-X
> > SATA controllers with only 4 Ports with less issues than the ones
> > already mentioned? :-)
> >
> > Maybe 4 are enough after all...
>
> What do you mean by "serious environments"?
>
> speed? reliability? harsh environment? support? other?
Reliability sounds good.. So having SMART work is probably a good idea
too :-)
I won't hotplug disks all the time, so rebooting once in a while when a
disk dies should not be an issue.
This is going to be the SATA controller for an NFS Server which stores
E-Mails and User home directories. Since network will probably be the
bottleneck, speed is not as important as reliability.
Vendor-Support is not that important, as long as the card is
well-supported by FreeBSD.
I also found Exys EX-3403, which is an 8-port SATA PCI-X card with a
Marvell MV88SX6081 for about 100€, but the Exys apparently only Supports
Windows - which shouldn't matter if at least the Chip is supported by
FreeBSD, no? According to earlier posts to this list (Hello Stephane :-),
this Chip works at least on 7.2.
Can someone tell me more about it?
> I have the Silicon Image 3132 which is PCIe-x1 with 2 sata ports.
> Not as fast as it should be but fast enough for my needs.
> Works well with FreeBSD siis(4), which provides NCQ.
> Works well with the 3726 port multiplier. Talks to recent
> 600MB/s drives at 300MB/s, unlike JMB363 which doesn't like
> 600MB/s drives, even with the sata rev hint set.
300MB/s should be enough.
> Look into the 3124 which has 4 ports and is IIRC PCI-X.
> Said to be faster than the 3132.
I'll take another look around.
> You probably want to avoid the first generation Silicon Image
> sata chips. They are very slow and word is that FreeBSD doesn't
> support them very well. (NetBSD does have good support, but they
> are still very slow.)
Noted, thanks for the hint.
> If you don't need ueber speed on multiple ports at once,
> port multipliers are a good way to get more ports.
Sounds useful, thanks.
> Issue: if a port has a problem (flaky disk or whatever), siis(4) may
> do a bunch of DELAY(big number) which interferes with other hardware
> doing real-time data logging, causing data to be lost. Unacceptable.
> Does not require power cycle though. I don't recall it even needing
> a reboot.
That doesn't sound good, but I guess somebody can tell me the issues of
any controller or driver that comes up in this discussion. If you're OK
with siis despite this, I should too.
Sorry for being quite verbose on this list, but I believe in ruling out
bad choices before actually buying hardware ;)
Thanks,
Moritz
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