From owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Oct 9 18:37:34 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6834A16A47E for ; Mon, 9 Oct 2006 18:37:34 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from richw@richw.org) Received: from smtp2.stanford.edu (smtp2.Stanford.EDU [171.67.20.25]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E3F9A43D72 for ; Mon, 9 Oct 2006 18:37:26 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from richw@richw.org) Received: from smtp2.stanford.edu (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by localhost (Postfix) with SMTP id 798D74C438 for ; Mon, 9 Oct 2006 11:37:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from whodunit.richw.org (SW-90-716-276-1.Stanford.EDU [171.66.155.243]) by smtp2.stanford.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id 34F984C0D9 for ; Mon, 9 Oct 2006 11:37:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by whodunit.richw.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 00C453C4BE; Mon, 9 Oct 2006 11:37:26 -0700 (PDT) X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at richw.org Received: from whodunit.richw.org ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (whodunit.richw.org [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id cdcsTEPi-mzU; Mon, 9 Oct 2006 11:37:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from [171.66.139.173] (jessejames.stanford.edu [171.66.139.173]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (Client CN "jessejames.richw.org", Issuer "richw.org" (verified OK)) (Authenticated sender: richw) by whodunit.richw.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F249F3C36D; Mon, 9 Oct 2006 11:37:24 -0700 (PDT) Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 11:37:24 -0700 From: Rich Wales User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 (Macintosh/20060909) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org References: <4525C731.1010206@spyderweb.com.au> In-Reply-To: <4525C731.1010206@spyderweb.com.au> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.94.0.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <20061009183724.F249F3C36D@whodunit.richw.org> Subject: Re: SATA II controller X-BeenThere: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: General discussion of FreeBSD hardware List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 18:37:34 -0000 Tim Aslat wrote: > I'm in the market for a SATA II controller, which must be > supported under FreeBSD (6.1 or earlier). I don't need RAID > support of any kind, but it would be nice to have 4 ports to > plug in drives. Cheap is ok, provided I can access the drives > under FreeBSD and set up gmirror on the drives. You might want to consider the Promise SATA300 TX4. This is a 4-port, non-RAID card. It's supported in FreeBSD 6.1 and later, and it retails for about US$70. Two issues to be aware of w/r/t Promise SATA cards: (1) Some people (myself included) have reported problems with this and other Promise cards -- device timeouts under heavy load. Other people have no problems at all. It currently looks like these problems may be caused by iffy motherboard design and/or by Promise being overly strict about PCI bus tolerances. I was able to make the problem go away for me by downgrading the PCI bus performance in my experimental system's BIOS setup. (2) The ordering of the four SATA ports on this card (and other newer Promise cards with PDC4xxxx-series chips) is scrambled; the labelling of port numbers on the card itself is wrong. Both of the above issues have been reported by several people in numerous forums (they aren't unique to FreeBSD). A web page with a Linux discussion thread about the port enumeration problem can be found here (note that this is one big, long line, with three hyphens between "order" and the first "SATA", in case your e-mail reader insists on mangling it): http://www.nabble.com/-PATCH--sata_promise%3A-Port-enumeration-order---SATA-150-TX4%2C-SATA-300-TX4-t1184287.html Hopefully the port enumeration issue can be fixed sometime reasonably soon in the FreeBSD code, but I suspect it's probably not really a showstopper issue if you're using a mirrored configuration. Rich Wales Palo Alto, CA, USA richw@richw.org http://www.richw.org