Daan Vreeken wrote:
Hi Christopher,
On Thursday 05 March 2009 15:25:35 Christopher Key wrote:
Hello,
I'm looking to substantially expand the storage on my FreeBSD 6.3 home
media server. With regards hardware, the simplest way to attach large
numbers of drives seem to be to use SATA port multipliers, but I've been
unable to find any consensus on their level of support in FreeBSD. I'm
currently looking at a RocketRAID 2314 and SiI3726 based port
multipliers. Has any had any experience with this combination?
The Sil3726 works very well if you run a recent enough version of FreeBSD. We
use the device in a custom storage appliance. I don't know the RocketRAID
2314 though. You need a SATA 2.0 controller for Port Multipliers to work.
I'm pretty sure the RocketRAID 2314 is a SATA 2.0 controller. I've
references in places to it supporting port multipliers, but have been
unable to to find any further details on quite what this means. To be
honest, I don't fully understand how the ATA system fits together.
HighPoint offer a FreeBSD driver, but I don't know whether this replaces
functionality within FreeBSD, or is an additional requirement. Nor do I
know whether port multiplier support is the responsibility of the ATA
driver, the ATA controller, both or either, nor whether the ATA
controller being a RAID card in JBOD mode affects anything. I was
thinking that for the RR2314 to work with port multipliers whilst it was
doing hardware RAID, it must fully understand how to address drives
behind a port multiplier and might do the same in JBOD mode, simply
presenting the ATA driver with a list of drives. Whether this is valid
reasoning, I've no idea.
FreeBSD has (experimental) support for Port Multipliers since the following
commit :
On Thursday 10 April 2008 15:05:05 Søren Schmidt wrote:
sos 2008-04-10 13:05:05 UTC
FreeBSD src repository
...
Log:
Add experimental support for SATA Port Multipliers
Support is working on the Silicon Image SiI3124/3132.
Support is working on some AHCI chips but far from all.
Remember this is WIP, so test reports and (constructive) suggestions are
welcome!
Thanks, I've found the relevent revision in SVN,
http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base?view=revision&revision=178067
I'll read through the diffs to see if I can get a better idea of how
everything works.
Kind Regards,
Christopher Key
_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
