SATA 3 disk running at 300MB

[jim71]

Hi,

I have always had this issue and never been able to fix it. I have an AMD board (Asus A99X EVO) with AMD 990X/SB950 chipset
and the SATA controller is discovered correctly as being 6Gbps capable:

Apr 18 15:58:29 nas4free kernel: ahci0: <AMD SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 AHCI SATA controller> port 0x5028-0x502f,0x5020-0x5023,0x5018-0x501f,0x5014-0x5017,0x5000-0x500f mem 0xfd4fe000-0xfd4fe3ff irq 19 at device 0.0 on pci11
Apr 18 15:58:29 nas4free kernel: ahci0: AHCI v1.20 with 6 6Gbps ports, Port Multiplier supported
Apr 18 15:58:29 nas4free kernel: ahcich0: <AHCI channel> at channel 0 on ahci0
Apr 18 15:58:29 nas4free kernel: ahcich1: <AHCI channel> at channel 1 on ahci0
Apr 18 15:58:29 nas4free kernel: ahcich2: <AHCI channel> at channel 2 on ahci0
Apr 18 15:58:29 nas4free kernel: ahcich3: <AHCI channel> at channel 3 on ahci0
Apr 18 15:58:29 nas4free kernel: ahcich4: <AHCI channel> at channel 4 on ahci0
Apr 18 15:58:29 nas4free kernel: ahcich5: <AHCI channel> at channel 5 on ahci0

However my WD RED SATA 3 disks are always running as SATA 2:

Apr 18 15:58:29 nas4free kernel: ada0: <WDC WD30EFRX-68AX9N0 80.00A80> ATA-9 SATA 3.x device
Apr 18 15:58:29 nas4free kernel: ada0: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Western Digital Red (AF)
Device Model: WDC WD30EFRX-xxxxxx
Serial Number: WD-xxxxxxx
LU WWN Device Id: xxxxxx
Firmware Version: 80.00A80
User Capacity: 3,000,592,982,016 bytes [3.00 TB]
Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: ACS-2 (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version is: SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is: Sat Apr 18 16:46:51 2015 CEST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===

I am runing the latest 9.3 Nas4free

First I would be interested to know if some other people using a build in AMD SB950 controler are
able to run disks in SATA 3 mode ? Indicating then that it is not a limitation of the freebsd ahci driver.

Then I can maybe add that I am not directly running N4F on this HW, I run ESXi 5.5 and N4F is a VM
where I have passed through the SATA controler. Maybe the problem comes from here ? Don't know.
If some people have a similiar setting I would be very interested to know if they also have this issue.

[b0ssman]

Then I can maybe add that I am not directly running N4F on this HW, I run ESXi 5.5 and N4F is a VM
where I have passed through the SATA controler.

please read
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?th ... ine.12484/

[jim71]

Thank you b0ssman. Interesting, and of course I do understand this is not an advised setup for production system, however
for my personnal home server this is perfectly fine as I cannot afford having 2 servers running 24x7 at home anyway

So I do PCI passthrough (not RDM) and have ECC ram and ZFS with 3 HDD. The VM datastore are on 2 other HDD in mirror on
a HW RAID controller. The ESX itself boot from an USB stick. This works very well since more than 2 years now

Frankly I am not convinced my data would be more secure runnning N4F directly on the same hardware (anyway I am doing
backups). Maybe I wouldn't have my issue with SATA 2 and 3, but this is the point of my post. If someone can confirm it is
running their HDD on SATA 3 mode on the same kind of hardware (AMD SB950) I would know it has something to do
with the virtualization.