Syba Card Not Detected?

[ll0renz]

Okay hi guys :) Glad to be joining you all here as users of FreeNAS.

Just to state it right off, I'm not particularly concerned about the overall performance of this box. I built it from old components and stuff I had laying around. It's just for my home use and I'm trying to get away with it cheaply. Naturally however, the one part I specifically bought is the one that doesn't work: the RAID card.

What I purchased was this:
SYBA SY-PCI40010 PCI SATA II (3.0Gb/s) 4 Port RAID 0/1/5/10 JBOD Card

and it's specifications here:
http://www.sybausa.com/productInfo.php?iid=530

I did it because the build I'm running (Pentium D 2.8 Ghz, Asus P5VDC-MX, 2GB DDR2) has PCI slots that I thought I could use and one of the reviews was from a guy who said he had it working perfectly in FreeNAS. The successful review was from 2011 so I figured compatibility would only improve right?

It seems not to be. The Syba card clearly does work, it is visible in the BIOS and before I flashed it to the JBOD firmware version (at the suggestion of someone on here) I was able to fully access it's RAID firmware and see the connected disks. However, booting up into FreeNAS, none of the disks are detected and the controller seems to be completely ignored.

I can only assume this is because there isn't driver support for the chipset the card uses (SIL3124). Anyone have any suggestions or light to shed on the subject here? I had thought I saw a couple users who had successful builds using equivalent cards with the same chipset but I can no longer locate them. This chipset isn't listed on the FreeBSD HCL, so am I really just out of luck with this card?

 

[cyberjock]

Well, I just googled the SIL3124 and it looks like the 3114 works, so it was presumed that the 3124 would work for someone else. However they found that it wouldn't work and there is no fix as of 2011.

99% of the time, if a card doesn't "Just Work" then the drivers aren't included with FreeNAS(FreeNAS doesn't have the drivers for every controller that FreeBSD supports), the card isn't supported in FreeBSD, or the hardware is faulty.

What I would do is try booting from a FreeBSD 8.3 CD as a live CD and see if the drives are detected and work. If they are then I'd try FreeBSD 9.1 CD as a live CD. I'd try to format the disks if you can get the detected as someone else said the disks appeared to be available to the system but the first time you attempted to read or write to the disks the system would freeze up. If it works in either situation or both you could put a ticket in at support.freenas.org and have it added. If it doesn't work you don't have much of a chance of seeing it work anytime soon.

Keep in mind that at that point, if you want to use FreeNAS with the controller and the driver does exists then you could either recompile FreeNAS yourself including the driver or wait for a nightly build that includes your driver. But.. nightly builds are experimental and shouldn't be trusted with data that you aren't making backups of. They have been known to have data-eating bugs so use with care.

My first guess.. your controller doesn't play well with FreeNAS or FreeBSD. I always just go straight to the recommended controllers as mentioned in the forum. You can't go wrong if you go with a controller that is known to work. Being that you are using PCI, I have no recommendations. Many(most?) PCI cards have issues with hard drives bigger than 2TB and other little issues you'll find out about later.

And my last disclaimer.. if you plan to use ZFS, you'd better have nothing less than 6GB of RAM if you value your data. People that try to go cheap with RAM often pay for it when their pool gets corrupted from insufficient RAM. Not sure what your intentions are, but I figured I'd put that warning out there.

Another thread I commented in regarding the SIL3124...

http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?10341-SiI-3124-Raid-Controller

and another thread where they said it seems to be a firmware issue...

http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?101-Sil3124

I'm thinking you're kind of screwed though. Good luck! Definitely report back and let us know how things turn out. Seems to be conflicting information on if the card works or not.

 

[gpsguy]

Perhaps the review was talking about the other FreeNAS, ie. v 0.7. It's successor is known as NAS4Free. Given the specs on your machine, you might want to look into it. Other than reading about it's history, I don't know anything about NAS4Free.

...one of the reviews was from a guy who said he had it working perfectly in FreeNAS. The successful review was from 2011 ...

 

[NAStyBox]

Okay hi guys :) Glad to be joining you all here as users of FreeNAS.

Just to state it right off, I'm not particularly concerned about the overall performance of this box. I built it from old components and stuff I had laying around. It's just for my home use and I'm trying to get away with it cheaply. Naturally however, the one part I specifically bought is the one that doesn't work: the RAID card.

What I purchased was this:
SYBA SY-PCI40010 PCI SATA II (3.0Gb/s) 4 Port RAID 0/1/5/10 JBOD Card

and it's specifications here:
http://www.sybausa.com/productInfo.php?iid=530

I did it because the build I'm running (Pentium D 2.8 Ghz, Asus P5VDC-MX, 2GB DDR2) has PCI slots that I thought I could use and one of the reviews was from a guy who said he had it working perfectly in FreeNAS. The successful review was from 2011 so I figured compatibility would only improve right?

It seems not to be. The Syba card clearly does work, it is visible in the BIOS and before I flashed it to the JBOD firmware version (at the suggestion of someone on here) I was able to fully access it's RAID firmware and see the connected disks. However, booting up into FreeNAS, none of the disks are detected and the controller seems to be completely ignored.

I can only assume this is because there isn't driver support for the chipset the card uses (SIL3124). Anyone have any suggestions or light to shed on the subject here? I had thought I saw a couple users who had successful builds using equivalent cards with the same chipset but I can no longer locate them. This chipset isn't listed on the FreeBSD HCL, so am I really just out of luck with this card?

(erase) Whoops, NM. Slightly different card on my end.