nForce4-SLI, AHCI and NCQ and FreeBSD 6.0

O. Hartmann ohartman at mail.uni-mainz.de
Fri Sep 23 03:01:14 PDT 2005


jason wrote:
> O. Hartmann wrote:
> 
>> Hello.
>> I have a little question about the popular nForce4-SLI chipset for the 
>> Socket 939 platform. The onboard SATA controller of the nForce4-SLI 
>> chipset claims to be NCQ (or SATA II) capable, but nVidia implemented 
>> this feature in a not-AHCI-standardised way, but as an own solution. 
>> My question is: Is the FBSD 6.X driver for the nForce4-SLI chipset 
>> capable of using NCQ (as I know, the driver has to enable NCQ and it's 
>> not done automatically by the harddrive-controller interaction).
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>> Oliver
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> Regaurdless of what the motherboard manufacturer says a SilI3114 SATA 
> controller is SATA spec 1.0.

Yes , that is exactly what I got from http://www.siliconimage.com/.

Every report I read about ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe/Premium gave the same 
technical specs: the second RAID5-capable SATA chip (SilI3114) is 
attached to the 32Bit bus (*NOT* PCIe). Also, there is *NO* 64Bit bus on 
any of the mentioned mainboards!

And, by the way, the nForce4-SLI MCP is capable of NCQ, but the 
capability is *NOT* AHCI conform, so it seemes to me that we need a 
special treatment using this add on - but we all know how restricted 
nVidia is offering internal details about their chipset to open source 
projects like FreeBSD.

This is what I found out searching the net, some articles and watching 
this list.
Oliver


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