*Small* SATA controller compatibility

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I need to add a drive or two to a couple of boxes with 6 SATA controllers on their motherboards. For slot and other reasons, and cost, I want to just plug in a cheap SATA controller card; most of the ones I've seen support two 6Gb ports internally, and sell for $13 - $25 online. (In one case, the idea is to add a mirrored pair vdev to an existing pool that's maxed out, to free up enough space to keep things running "one more month" and while we get things straightened out enough to eliminate a few TB of duplicate video files and things, masters that we can't risk making mistakes with. In the other case, the idea is being able to run RAIDZ2 instead of just RAIDZ and still have enough space for the requirements, using the existing chassis being repurposed as a backup server. This is for what is essentially hobby video work, where the data storage requirements are seriously challenging our rather limited personal budgets.)

Does the following line from the FreeBSD hardware list mean what I think it does: "The ahci(4) driver supports AHCI compatible controllers having PCI class 1 (mass storage), subclass 6 (SATA) and programming interface 1 (AHCI)."? It sounds to me like it means that cheap generic controllers are likely to work.

Anybody know if say the SYBA SY-PEX40039 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Controller Card works? $15 at Newegg.

 

[jgreco]

It's reasonably likely to work, but it is hard to know.

We know the Intel provided ports usually work very well, as do LSI HBA provided ports, which is why 99% of the discussion here revolves around those.

We know some of the Marvell controllers suck with the FreeBSD drivers.

 

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Gonna look what's actually in stock at Micro Center tomorrow, while avoiding Marvell chipsets, and if that fails, then order. Can't really afford to experiment, but also can't afford *not* to experiment.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, sorry, most of the guys around here just go for the LSI ports and then disregard the mainboard ports if there are extras. Not necessarily the cheapest option, I know.

 

[David Dyer-Bennet]

That, in fact, is about what my older server is doing (14 controller ports, 6+8, and 12 drive bays). I had the money to do it that way at the time, plus I needed more than just a couple of extra ports to configure that box as intended. (It's still running an old Solaris; in fact part of the deal with all this new activity is to finally switch it over to running FreeNAS.)

 

[David Dyer-Bennet]

For the record, ended up with my first test being a Syba controller with Marvell chipset:

IO Crest 2 Port SATA III 2 Port eSATA III PCIe 1.0 x 2 Card Components SI-PEX40065

Shows up in the logs as:

ahci0: <Marvell 88SE9215 AHCI SATA controller> port 0xec00-0xec07,0xe880-0xe883,0xe800-0xe807,0xe480-0xe483,0xe400-0xe41f mem 0xfebff800-0xfebfffff irq 19 at device 0.0 on pci4
ahci0: AHCI v1.00 with 4 6Gbps ports, Port Multiplier supported with FBS

This one has been running now over 24hours with an artificial disk load. Two disks on this, 4 disks on the motherboard ports, split into two zpools (first has three motherboard disks, second has one motherboard and two add-in disks). No glitches, no weird log entries, no disk errors reported. Performance seems to be roughly matching the motherboard controllers (disk activity graphs in the "reporting" tab of the GUI hit the same height regardless of controller).

This is overkill, but maybe useful at that; supports two internal and two external SATA ports (and only about $25). I'm calling it a success, in any case.

It occurs to me that I ought to find some old PCI graphics cards, even a plain-jane VGA, and get the fancy modern cards out of the PCI-Express x16 slots; those are better used for additional controllers, and modern graphics co-processors are irrelevant for the console. Or learn to set FreeNAS up with serial console only -- but I always seem to need to poke around at the BIOS quite a bit, so having a head at least for that stage of setup is necessary.

 

[jgreco]

I've spent a few minutes looking around for this and apparently that Marvell is one of the newer AHCI controllers that works "better." Please please do write back in this thread if you experience issues.

 

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Will do!

 

[bricebm]

I just wanted to give my feedback on the card also. I purchased the same IO Crest card and it has been running in my system for over a month without any problems. My setup is a Lenovo ts140 motherboard transported into another case with 6 2tb Western Digital green drives in a raid z2 running the latest stable version on 9.3. I have 5 drives on the motherboard ports and one on the controller so even if the controller fails, the array should be fine. So far, it looks like the card is going to work out fine. May be a cheaper option for some. Time will tell about the longevity of the card.

 

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Card still running happily. I've just been monitoring a scrub today, with 6 motherboard ports and 1 controller port currently in use, and I can't tell which is which from the performance graphs.

 

[jgreco]

Use Storage->Volumes->View Disks to translate a device name like ada0 to a drive that can be identified by serial number.

 

[Sabin1936]

I purchased one of these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AZ9T3OU/?tag=ozlp-20 based on reports that Marvell 88SE9215 works with current FreeNAS. The card shows up in pciconf -lv but drives attached to it do not show up anywhere. Anything obvious I'm missing? Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Were the drives attached at POST time, or later? I have a card with a 88SE9230 chipset and it doesn't even POST without any drives attached.

 

[CraigD]

I have the card in the Amazon link in my freeNAS machine and can confirm it works (When I clicked the link Amazon it says I have purchased this item in the past)

I plugged it in hooked up the drives and it worked

You may have a bad card (assuming the other components are known good)

Have Fun

 

[Sabin1936]

I tried both with a drive connected at POST and without. In both cases the drive did not show up.

CraigD - I tried two separate HGST 4GB NAS drives, neither worked. I'm running FreeNAS-9.10-STABLE-201605240427 (64fcd8e). From reports I assume this has worked for multiple builds already and that's not the issue. Am I missing anything?

I will try some more configurations over the weekend.

 

[CraigD]

I tried both with a drive connected at POST and without. In both cases the drive did not show up.

CraigD - I tried two separate HGST 4GB NAS drives, neither worked. I'm running FreeNAS-9.10-STABLE-201605240427 (64fcd8e). From reports I assume this has worked for multiple builds already and that's not the issue. Am I missing anything?

I will try some more configurations over the weekend.

You are not missing anything, it was plug and play for me.

Like I said before you may have a dud.

Maybe test the card with the drives in say a Windows PC and see if it works.

Good Luck

 

[joeschmuck]

@Sabin1936 , You should have known this was coming... Post your system specs. I'm glad you are trying to add a card but what are you adding it to and exactly which slot on the motherboard are you plugging it in to? I have two of the SI-PEX40062 cards in my system and before I ran ESXi, FreeNAS worked with them just fine. My cards are PCI-E X2 bus where yours are PCI-E X1 bus, otherwise they are identical.

 

[Sabin1936]

I have now tried connecting an existing drive to the PCI card, disconnecting it from the motherboard's SATA port. It worked just fine. Clearly the problem lies elsewhere. Sorry for the trouble everyone.

 

[CraigD]

I'm glad you got it sorted

 

[Sabin1936]

In case anyone was wondering, it was the power cable I was using to the new drive. :(