Stable many-port SATA controller recommendations
Peter Schuller
peter.schuller at infidyne.com
Thu May 10 21:25:18 UTC 2007
> Promise are supposed to be one of the better makes when it comes to
> documentation and open source support,
Yes, that was my impression prior to purchasing the two TX4:s.
> what problems are you seeing?
I can easily (dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile bs=$((1024*1024)) count=500)
trigger within a few seconds:
WARNING - WRITE_DMA48 UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=<a number>
Followed perhaps 30 seconds later by the usual flooding of g_vfs_done()
errors and a panic resulting from the inability to flush dirty buffers.
If anyone is interested I can provide actual details, but there's
nothing really interesting to see as far as I can tell.
I have tried several different SATA cables (since in other contexts with
other controllers these messages were supposedly often indicative of bad
cabling).
The TX4, or at least this particular type, is specifically a PDC40718. I
did talk to someone on ##freebsd who indicated he had not had any
trouble with this particular chipset, so I presume it is somehow being
triggered by the environment. It's an Epox EP-8KMM5I motherboard.
> 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.
Ok. 64bit/4 GB is not an immediate problem for me, though it will be
relevant in the future. But nice to hear someone had it working stably.
> 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..).
Yes. Given that I do not intend to utilize the hardware RAID support,
having to go for a RAID card is to me just a downside, even disregarding
the increase in cost.
Thank you for the input!
--
/ Peter Schuller
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