SATA300 Controllers

[Alain Hebert]

    Hi,

    I've been having the same issues.

    The conclusion of my testing is that type of card (aka Adaptec 
1210SA, Promise PDC2* ) are not stable, reliable, performant.
    (For my taste btw)

    The underlying technology is just mickey mouse:

       They store the config on drive (ok);
       They dont accelerate mirror that much. (mirror function in driver);
       If you loose a drive your filesystem jam (since the mirror 
function is in the driver);
       You have to rebuilt via the bios (long downtime).

    The best card are the 3ware 9000/9500 series.  Which is a real hard 
implementation.

    FYI: I have both success with Marvell 88SX5041 SATA150 and Promise 
PDC20378 SATA150.

    I had major failure under load with Adaptec 1210SA and Promise TX2300.

    Good luck.

Derrick T. Woolworth wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> Sorry for cross-posting, but these issues seem relevant for lists...
>
> 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
> results.  I've read that the chipset on this controller is not very 
> good -
> forces serialized access to the controller's channels???  
> Nevertheless, I've
> got a K8N Diamond motherboard on a workstation and I was able to at least
> "start" the 6.1 installation.  I have no idea if its stable.  At this 
> point,
> I'd settle for just knowing "which" SATA300 controller to use that 
> will work
> successfully and "well" with FreeBSD 6.0 OR 6.1.  Another question, 
> would I
> have more success installing 6.0 and then upgrading the kernel and
> recompiling with a build-world?
>
> I'm currently trying to build a moderate large system with 4 presentation
> servers, 2 database servers and one large storage system using NFS 
> mapped to
> ~1.2 terrabyte of SATA disks (4x Maxtor 500GB 7200 RPM disks w/RAID5
> config).  Any suggestions?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Derrick
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-- 
Alain Hebert                                ahebert at pubnix.net   
PubNIX Inc.        
P.O. Box 175       Beaconsfield, Quebec     H9W 5T7	
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