SATA II controller

[Rich Wales]

Tim Aslat wrote:

> I'm in the market for a SATA II controller, which must be
> supported under FreeBSD (6.1 or earlier).  I don't need RAID
> support of any kind, but it would be nice to have 4 ports to
> plug in drives.  Cheap is ok, provided I can access the drives
> under FreeBSD and set up gmirror on the drives.

You might want to consider the Promise SATA300 TX4.  This is a
4-port, non-RAID card.  It's supported in FreeBSD 6.1 and later,
and it retails for about US$70.

Two issues to be aware of w/r/t Promise SATA cards:

(1) Some people (myself included) have reported problems with this
    and other Promise cards -- device timeouts under heavy load.
    Other people have no problems at all.  It currently looks like
    these problems may be caused by iffy motherboard design and/or
    by Promise being overly strict about PCI bus tolerances.  I
    was able to make the problem go away for me by downgrading the
    PCI bus performance in my experimental system's BIOS setup.

(2) The ordering of the four SATA ports on this card (and other
    newer Promise cards with PDC4xxxx-series chips) is scrambled;
    the labelling of port numbers on the card itself is wrong.

Both of the above issues have been reported by several people in
numerous forums (they aren't unique to FreeBSD).  A web page with a
Linux discussion thread about the port enumeration problem can be
found here (note that this is one big, long line, with three hyphens
between "order" and the first "SATA", in case your e-mail reader
insists on mangling it):

http://www.nabble.com/-PATCH--sata_promise%3A-Port-enumeration-order---SATA-150-TX4%2C-SATA-300-TX4-t1184287.html

Hopefully the port enumeration issue can be fixed sometime reasonably
soon in the FreeBSD code, but I suspect it's probably not really a
showstopper issue if you're using a mirrored configuration.

Rich Wales
Palo Alto, CA, USA
richw at richw.org
http://www.richw.org