Stable many-port SATA controller recommendations

[Thomas Hurst]

* Peter Schuller (peter.schuller at infidyne.com) wrote:

> after spending time and money on several Promise and Sillicon Image
> based cards that don't work properly, I am still in desperate need of a
> stable SATA controller.

Promise are supposed to be one of the better makes when it comes to
documentation and open source support, what problems are you seeing?

> My main candidate is the AOC-SAT2-MV8. Can anyone offer input on the
> stability of this card in FreeBSD? It would be perfect because it is
> priced very well.

It's supported, and even better, the Marvell is supposedly now 64bit
clean with ata(4) in HEAD.  When I tried it a year or so ago it would,
like any other ATA controller, explode with more than a couple of disks
and >=4GB RAM because of problems with the way bounce buffers are
allocated; I didn't see any problems aside from that, but I didn't test
it very much.

> If the Marvell is out, other main contenders are the 8 port LSI
> MegaRAID, Highpoint RocketRaid and 3ware cards. But these are all on
> the expensive side, with the half-exception of the MegaRaid 300-8XLP
> which is only semi-expensive.

When ata(4) proved itself utterly useless in environments with decent
amounts of memory, I got an 8 port LSI MegaRAID, since amr(4) had just
been given an overhaul to make it MPSAFE and 64bit clean; I've not had
any real problems with it (aside the occasional fight with the BIOS,
which is par for the course with RAID controllers), but I'd still prefer
a real SATA controller so things are a little more predictable and
flexible (SMART support, software RAID, disks exposed to the actual OS
and not some dodgy half-assed ASIC..).

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst
    http://hur.st/
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