Looking for a motherboard with lots of SATA ports, supported in 6.2-STABLE

[Ravi Pokala]

> From: Fluffles <etc at fluffles.net>
> Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2007 09:56:02 +0200
> To: Ravi Pokala <rp_freebsd at mac.com>
> Cc: <freebsd-hardware at freebsd.org>
> Subject: Re: Looking for a motherboard with lots of SATA ports, supported in
> 6.2-STABLE
> 
> Ravi Pokala wrote:
>> My main concerns are that the networking is well supported (GigE preferred of
>> course), and that there are lots of supported on-board SATA ports. I
>> currently have four SATA drives, so I'd prefer six or eight ports on the new
>> board for growth.
>> 
>> I'd also like decent on-board graphics, on the off chance I want to dual-boot
>> it to play some older games. In FreeBSD, it just needs to be supported enough
>> to give me a VGA console.
>>   
> 
> You probably won't find 8 SATA ports and onboard video, these two just
> don't match. You either take a high-end board with lots of features, but
> *never* have onboard video (IGP), of you take a microATX board with
> onboard video which have 2 maybe 4 SATA ports.
> 

Heh. You're right of course. I wasn't able to find any 8-SATA boards with
onboard video, but I did find a few 6-SATA boards.

> So you may want to drop this demand and get a PCI videocard and focus on
> boards with lots of Serial ATA connectors. Also be sure to check if
> these are supplied by the chipset (best) or by some second chip on the
> motherboard. Sometimes these 'extra' chips use the old and obsolete PCI
> bus for data transfer, which can be very slow especially in a RAID
> configuration.
> 
> Maybe you can search for boards and post them on the mailinglist, so we
> can check if the SATA and gigabit works?
> 

Someone else on the list, who wished to remain anonymous, offered this
advice:

| The 165 boards seem to have lots of sata ports. I believe th g165 also has
| on board video. Looking through the selection at newegg there are quite a
| few with 6 sata ports (for example:
| http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128018).
| 

I had actually been looking at that board (GA-965G-DS3) before mailing the
list, but I was concerned about the Marvell 8056 NIC and Gigabyte SATA
controller.

I had a friend with a -CURRENT tree do some grepping, and it looks like the
NIC is supported by the msk driver. Also, (wonder of wonders!) Marvell has a
downloadable driver for 6.x (myk). There's a readable manpage and
everything! :-)

I am leery of any SATA controller that I've never heard of, and I feared
that perhaps this was something I already knew from work and didn't like.
Some googling suggests it's actually a JMicron controller that is decent and
fairly well supported by 6.2-STABLE. Can anyone confirm that?

I do find it odd that they would use discrete chips for the NIC and extra
SATA ports, when the chipset contains both.

| Another board is the newer g33
| http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128053
| ---
| I know there are p165 boards with 8+ ports - i did not check that many of
| the g165/g33 boards.
| 
| I do not know which (if any) of these boards freebsd currently support.
| The g33 is quite new so is less likely but the g165 is more likely.
| 

I looked through some drivers, and it looks like the ICH9 in the G33 chipset
isn't supported in -CURRENT, so that board is out.

Does anyone else have any other suggestions?

> Good luck!
> - Veronica

Thanks! And also to my anonymous advisor.

--rp