Looking for a (s)ata controller

[twoj]

I am trying to build a N4F box with somewhere in the range of 12 to 24 hard drives, I already have one running with the IBM M1015 with the modified firmware which is working well however as noted in a few places, the disks on those cards are detected as SCSI (da0, da1, dax) and therefore the spindown and power controls are not working natively.

I would like any recommendations for a pcie controller card that handles preferably SATA3, up to the latest hard drives (ie 4tb) and that the disks appear as ata drives and that the spindown and smart features work for these drives. It would be preferable that it could handle 20-24 drives but I could also get 2 cards if the max they could do was like 12 attached disks.
Also that these controllers work with any necessity to re-flash firmware or other modifications.

If you have any personal experience I would also much appreciate any comments about the card(s).

thanks

[ChriZathens]

If I am not mistaken, RedAntz's experimental build is focused exactly on the problem with disks behind RAID controllers.
So, since no sata controller (IMHO) can compete in speed with a controller like M1015, I suggest you wait a bit and avoid further shopping...

[b0ssman]

the m1015 could support the spindown, however the freebsd driver does not.

[twoj]

I'm all in favour of using the M1015, especially since I have 6 spare ones from work.
I'll see if I can get a test bed going to try out the experimental build, why do I find myself on the bleeding edge of tech? I consider my wants for tech relatively simple but somehow I find myself running betas to get stuff - oh well!

I think i'll take a parallel investigation along the sata controller path as well since I would like to have an alternative from a experimental beta build. after some quick searching yesterday it seems like most controllers are maxing out at about 8.

It would be great if there was somewhere that showed what drivers (or controllers) show up as ata or da (scsi) for N4F

thanks

[b0ssman]

you can make spindown work.

just read

viewtopic.php?f=59&t=4111

[twoj]

yeah I saw that post recently,
for my system with the M1015 I put in a simple camcontrol script that shuts them down after 30mins but its not the same as idle control.
As I said I just wanted if possible to get it natively without the need of scripting it in.

Alother factor is that I believe the M1015 can only do a max of 8 drives so if I have 17-24 drives I would need a 3rd card, and I was hoping to keep it to a maximum of 2.

[b0ssman]

you could go for an m1015+ Intel RES2SV240

[Lee Sharp]

I have used Syba 2-Port SATA III SI-PEX40061 in systems that have enough slots and IRQs. It helps if they have a lot of onboard SATA ports. See my post here. viewtopic.php?f=59&t=3870

[RedAntz]

I'm all in favour of using the M1015, especially since I have 6 spare ones from work.
I'll see if I can get a test bed going to try out the experimental build, why do I find myself on the bleeding edge of tech? I consider my wants for tech relatively simple but somehow I find myself running betas to get stuff - oh well!

Current experimental build does not intend to fix sleep/standby since I intentionally avoid expanding the patch to cover that for now in order to prevent scope creep. I am aware that some of the sleep / standby code does not work quite well. Reviewing sleep/standby code is next on my list, after I get the controller detection code merge into trunk.

It may be possible to issue -g command via smartctl to put hard disk to standby / sleep, but I have not tried it yet.
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ma ... ctl.8.html

[twoj]

RedAntz - so the sleep / standby is not working with the M1015, but does the spindown work for it?

[twoj]

I put together my most recent server/NAS and i'm testing different stuff with it. I've tried FreeNAS 9.1.1 and it seems to suffer the same issue as NAS4Free in regards to idle settings on the hard drives (spindown) when they are attached on a M1015. They show up as scsi drives (dax) and they don't work with the ACHI spindown control. This is as has been reported because of a problem with the FreeBSD driver, hence why it affects both FreeNAS and N4F.

As RedAntz posted, his experimental build was to address SMART attributes and does Not address power control of drives on the M1015.

I've done some more research and it seems that there are a few 4 port pcie v2 controller/raid cards that are based on the marvell 88SE92XX chipset, these are mostly made by Syba, Startech, and HighPoint. It seems that these are seen by N4F as ada drives which should work natively with the power settings. So 4 additional drives per card seems the maximum that I can find for ada (SATA) detected drives, as opposed to the 8 drives that the M1015 card can achieve but detected as da (SCSI).

It also seems that Marvell has recently release a port multiplier chip 88SM9705 which Syba has released a card;
http://www.sybausa.com/productInfo.php?iid=1433
the SI-PEX40071 which seems to use 2 of these chips (incorrectly stating that it is 88SE9705 not the 88SM9705), which achieves 8 ports. Obviously having 8 SATA III (6GHz) get bottled down to a 1 SATA III connection means this is not for high performance systems but it may be suitable for lower demands. It seems the chips and cards have just been released, no stock to be found but newegg has it for about $100USD.

I'd appreciate if anyone can verify these chips/cards are working or comment on their functionality with N4F.

thanks