Marvell based SATA cards

[Majo]

Just a warning / observation so that you don't make the same mistake:

Since all the SATA lanes on my (Supermicro)-board are full I bought a Dawicontrol card (DC-600e) for tests. I know it's a RAID card but my distributor had a returned one for cheap, i only need a single disk, so JBOD would be ok. Remember, it's for testing only.

Plugged it in, configured it in the BIOS (JBOD) and noticed that FreeNAS didn't recognize it. I'm runing 9.10 with FreeBSD 10 underneath. I was pretty sure that it should be recognized, but can't remember where i read it. Maybe i just read about SATA cards with a 'Marvell' chipset.

'lspci' finds it:

05:00.0 RAID bus controller [0104]: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Device [1b4b:9170] (rev 13)

Then i had a look at the kernel source (/sys/dev/ahci/ahci_pci.c). Snippet for the Marvell 91xx chipsets:

...
{0x91201b4b, 0x00, "Marvell 88SE912x", AHCI_Q_EDGEIS},
{0x91231b4b, 0x11, "Marvell 88SE912x", AHCI_Q_ALTSIG},
{0x91231b4b, 0x00, "Marvell 88SE912x", AHCI_Q_EDGEIS|AHCI_Q_SATA2},
{0x91251b4b, 0x00, "Marvell 88SE9125", 0},
{0x91281b4b, 0x00, "Marvell 88SE9128", AHCI_Q_ALTSIG},
{0x91301b4b, 0x00, "Marvell 88SE9130", AHCI_Q_ALTSIG},
{0x91721b4b, 0x00, "Marvell 88SE9172", 0},
{0x91821b4b, 0x00, "Marvell 88SE9182", 0},
{0x91831b4b, 0x00, "Marvell 88SS9183", 0},
{0x91a01b4b, 0x00, "Marvell 88SE91Ax", 0},
...

So the 9170 isn't supported. According to Wikipedia the chipsets aren't documented much (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marvell_Technology_Group_chipsets), so not all are supported.

Bottom line: If you buy a Marvell based SATA card, check the chipset first. Only above 91xx chipsets are supported in FreeBSD. For an overview of all chipsets look at the source (e.g. here. http://code.metager.de/source/xref/freebsd/sys/dev/ahci/ahci_pci.c)

Linux has the same problem. The community claims it's safe to just add the correct ID to the driver but (1) i'm not going to run untested code and (2) i'm not in the mood of patching and compiling the kernel and run FreeNAS with a custom kernel... Anyone want to buy a Dawicontrol DC-600e card? :)

 

[Ericloewe]

Marvell controllers are dubious on Windows, let alone FreeBSD.

I honestly don't understand why there are so many damned SATA 6Gb/s chipsets out there if they're all mostly crap. Nobody seems to make one people can point at and say "Yeah, it's a SATA 6Gb/s controller that works, is plenty fast and doesn't have any stupid driver issues".

 

[DaveY]

It's definitely a pain to figure out which chipset is crap and which is good. Not that I endorse Marvell chipsets, but WD seems to trust them with their Red drives.

 

[Ericloewe]

On the drive side, there isn't much to choose from.

Marvell can do reasonable products, as seen in their SSD and HDD controllers, but their customers are much more interested in reliability than the manufacturer of your average consumer-grade SATA card.

 

[TheSmoker]

Let's not forget that some of the ASRock miniITX boards used in FreeNas Mini have 6-8 ports (my memory is not as good as it was) are on Marvell chips...

Later edit: http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=C2750D4I#Specifications