nForce4-SLI, AHCI and NCQ and FreeBSD 6.0

Malachi de Ælfweald malachid at gmail.com
Fri Sep 23 18:24:24 PDT 2005


We found an Asus support page saying that you have to run the hitachi
software to enable the 3Gb/sec on the drives. I did that, and it said the
motherboard was not compatible.

I called Asus -- and they confirmed what you have been saying. The Si3114
supports RAID5 and the nVidia SATAII -- which is unfortunate, because I
bought the motherboard based on their false advertisements.

I am in the process of switching the drives over to the nVidia controller
now.

Malachi

On 9/23/05, O. Hartmann <ohartman at mail.uni-mainz.de> wrote:
>
> 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
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
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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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