SATA300 Controllers

[Søren Schmidt]

Rick C. Petty wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 03:26:17PM -0600, Scott Long wrote:
>   
>>>> Has anyone had success with SATA300 controllers with FreeBSD 6.1?  I've 
>>>> been
>>>> trying Promise and nVidia nForce4 and I'm not having any luck.  Using a 
>>>> MSI
>>>> K8NGM2-L motherboard and others, but 6.1's installation hangs as soon as 
>>>> it
>>>> sees ad4.  I've also tried using an Adaptec 1210SA controller and had zero
>>>>         
>> Promise has a good relationship with FreeBSD, I would expect their 
>> controllers to work pretty well.
>>     
>
> I'm using a few "Promise PDC40718 SATA300 controller" with identical
> SATA300 drives and it seems to work well.  My only gripe is the channels
> are misnumbered:
> 	port #1 maps to	channel 3
> 	port #2 maps to channel 1
> 	port #3 maps to channel 0
> 	port #4 maps to channel 2
>
> I had to use the serial numbers to make sure I was writing on the correct
> drives, so that was annoying.
>   
Actually its the channel numbering printed on the card thats flawed, it 
doesn't match the physical channel numbers that the chip uses (and hence 
ATA channel numbers).
I have no idea why they did that on some of their controllers, but I 
suspect historical reasons as they older controllers had the physical  
connectors in that order (3 1 0 2), but the guy that did the silkscreen 
layout probably ordered them "nicely" at some point :)


-Søren