PCI-X SATA Card + Server Recommendation

[Danny Carroll]

Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> Re: SATAII: if the product data sheet or the user manual states the card
> supports SATA300, then yes.
> 
> Re: NCQ: the user manual probably answers this question, or a FAQ/KB
> article.  I hope you're not planning on disabling write caching on your
> disks (as people often ask if controllers or drives supports command
> queueing so they can do this.  NCQ does not provide the amount of
> performance increase like SCSI command queuing does.  On the other
> hand, TCQ (often found on SAS drives) does.)

That's a good point about the cache, I forgot about the one on the drives.


> I have no idea.  I suppose it would have to support pass(4), or provide
> the functionality itself (Areca controllers do the latter). 

3ware as well I am told.

> I recommend avoiding Adaptec.  I will repeat that: avoid Adaptec.

I appreciate the comment, can you tell me why or is it a personal
preference?

> You are not going to find a SATA card that has non-RAID capability with
> that amount of ports.  Besides, it shouldn't matter to you if the card
> has RAID capability, because nothing forces you to use it.  All that
> should matter to you is the following:
> 
> * Is the card version/model supported under FreeBSD?
> * Does the card supports disks in a JBOD fashion (not part of an array)?
> * Can I get SMART stats from the drive (or via CLI; see below)?
> * Is there a native FreeBSD CLI binary for controlling features of the
>   controller if I need it?

Yup.

> 
>> There is not much out there and it's all expensive.
> 
> But neither of these are FreeBSD problems.  The same would apply if you
> were using any operating system.

No, I agree it is not a Freebsd problem.  It's everything to do with
demand at the moment.


> I have not seen these on any of our systems.  Chances are they're ACPI
> or AML errors which can be fixed by the vendor with a BIOS upgrade.
> I would recommend asking about this on freebsd-acpi instead.

Thanks!

-D