Recommended supported SATA Cards?

[Steve Polyack]

On 06/29/10 16:58, Rob wrote:
> I've been trying to find a PCI-e SATA II (300MB/s) controller card for 
> a FreeBSD 8.0 system, but am having problems determining if FreeBSD 
> 8.0 will support them.  Ideally I'd like to find one that is not a HW 
> Raid controller, as I don't need that functionality since I place to 
> use ZFS and the HW Raid on the card just gets in the way.  I know that 
> a HighPoint RocketRAID 23x0 (2310, 2320) will work with the htprr 
> driver, but those are HW RAID cards.
>
> I've found 'Adaptec 2241000-R 1430SA' and 'Rosewill RC-218' cards, and 
> those are the ones I'm having a hard time telling if FreeBSD supports. 
> Searching of the e-mail archives has given me mixed results and 
> nothing definitive to say that they work.
>
> I'm not sure what chipset the Adaptec 2241000-R 1430SA uses, but the 
> Rosewill uses the Marvell 88SX7042 chipset.  I'd prefer to use Adaptec 
> if possible as in the past they produced good SCSI boards and used to 
> be well supported (in Linux anyway), but I'll use the Rosewill if it's 
> well supported in FreeBSD.  It's also possible Adaptec has taken a hit 
> in support/quality since I last used one of their boards. :)
>
I think the Marvell SATA chipset work is still a work-in-progress.  It 
may still be supported by the ata(4) driver, but that driver typically 
does not support any SATA-specific features, such as NCQ.

> Does anyone know if the above boards are supported in FreeBSD?  Anyone 
> have any recommendations for PCI-e 4x SATA controllers with a minimum 
> of 4 internal connectors?

We use a handful of the SYBA SY-PEX40008 cards 
(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124027) to 
manage a handful of drives with ZFS.  The cards have some RAID features, 
but you can simply plug disks in and use them without involving the RAID 
layer.  If your motherboard supports it, you can even disable the Option 
ROM from showing up on boot.

Overall, the performance has been pretty good.  The siis(4) driver has 
full support for the Sil3124 chipset that these use and supports all of 
the bells & whistles like NCQ and FIS-based switching for port 
multipliers.  They have also been very stable.  The only gripe for me is 
that it's only 1x PCI-E, instead of 4x, so you won't get full 
performance out of it once you have 4 fast drives attached.


>
> Rob
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