SOLVED USB3 PCI card - NEC chipset - HP G7 microserver

[GraceCourt]

I have a need to use a USB3 external drive to move large files between FreeNAS servers that are geographically distant, and transferring them via the Internet isn't even on the radar screen - the Isle of Skye doesn't have any exchanges with anything other than ADSL Max and there's no 3G coverage whatsoever... in fact, much of the island has no mobile coverage at all and a mobile phone is only useful for throwing at seagulls!

Anyway... I know that USB3 isn't well supported in FreeNAS but xHCI is built into the FreeNAS kernel. The problem is that my Dynamode 2-port USB3 PCI card isn't "seen" by FreeNAS... I tried booting Win7 on the same HP Microserver - an N40L with 8GB of ECC RAM - and loaded the Win7 drivers supplied with the card, which uses the NEC D70200 chipset. The drivers loaded and the USB host controller was accessible so no hardware problem with the card. I also tried the USB3 external drive in the HP Microserver... umass immediately recognised it and installed it as a USB2 device, indeed umass always recognises the USB thumb drive used to install and boot FreeNAS - it's mounted as the usual da0 - so the issue seems to be the NEC D70200 chipset.

Am I flogging a dead horse here? :(

 

[dlavigne]

Did you create a tunable to load USB3 support and reboot?

 

[GraceCourt]

Did you create a tunable to load USB3 support and reboot?

Yes, but... [blush!] when I checked to make sure that I was using the correct tunable, I realised that I had used xhci_load=yes instead of xhci_load=YES ... duh!

Thanks, dlavigne, for saving me a lot of time that would have been wasted had you not highlighted the tunable. For anyone else contemplating installation of a USB3 card that uses the NEC D70200 chipset... the kernel is now reporting the drive as da1 with 400MB/s transfer rate, so go for it.