AHCI and correct drive geometry?

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 08:12:26AM +0100, Josef Karthauser wrote:
> So what's the word on AHCI and bios drive geometry? I'm having a real
> pain of a time trying to get some 750gb sata drives running on my
> FreeBSD7 box in AHCI mode. It doesn't seem to matter what disk geometry
> I suggest to sysinstall, something complains of an invalid disk upon
> booting it.
> 
> Actually, in AHCI mode the bios screen doesn't report any information on
> drive geometry, so all bets appear to be off in giving sysinstall the
> correct figures.

I have no problems using AHCI on our Supermicro SuperServer 5015M-T+
systems, which are Intel ICH7-based, and with disks ranging up to 500GB.
There are no disk geometry issues I encounter.

Here's an example of one of the heavily-loaded boxes.  The boot/OS disk
is ad4.

atapci1: <Intel AHCI controller> port 0x30e8-0x30ef,0x30dc-0x30df,0x30e0-0x30e7,0x30d8-0x30db,0x30b0-0x30bf mem 0xe8600400-0xe86007ff irq 19 at device 31.2 on pci0
atapci1: [ITHREAD]
atapci1: AHCI Version 01.10 controller with 4 ports detected
ata2: <ATA channel 0> on atapci1
ata2: [ITHREAD]
ata3: <ATA channel 1> on atapci1
ata3: [ITHREAD]
ata4: <ATA channel 2> on atapci1
ata4: [ITHREAD]
ata5: <ATA channel 3> on atapci1
ata5: [ITHREAD]

ad4: 190782MB <WDC WD2000JD-00HBB0 08.02D08> at ata2-master SATA150
ad6: 476940MB <WDC WD5000AAKS-00YGA0 12.01C02> at ata3-master SATA300
ad8: 476940MB <WDC WD5000AAKS-00TMA0 12.01C01> at ata4-master SATA300
ad10: 476940MB <WDC WD5000AAKS-00TMA0 12.01C01> at ata5-master SATA300

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                    jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                           http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                  PGP: 4BD6C0CB |