Re: marvell sata status?

[Jody Belka <lists-lkml@pimb.org>]

On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 11:10:58AM -0500, Mark Lord wrote:
> Jody Belka wrote:
> >On Thu, Jan 01, 2009 at 02:11:37PM -0500, Justin Piszcz wrote:
> >>On Thu, 1 Jan 2009, Jody Belka wrote:
> >>>Cool, I think I'll go for that card then (Adaptec 1430SA). They're
> >>>x4, so good bandwidth, and i'll use the x16 slots on my board for
> >>>them. Only need one for now, but two eventually. And they're a good
> >>>price, at only £77 each.
> >>Does the card 'recognize' disks as SATA or do you have to export them as 
> >>JBOD? The star tech card allows you to see the sata drives directly.
> >
> >Well, it's just fake-raid, so surely you can always see the individual 
> >drives?
> >Are there actually cards out there that don't? *boggle*
> >
> >Hmm.... ok, checking the Adaptec knowledgebase:
> >
> >Q: Can drives be used on an Adaptec RAID controller but not be used as
> >   part of a RAID array?
> >
> >A: Hard drives attached to an Adaptec RAID controller do not have to be
> >   configured as an array member to work properly. The RAID controller
> >   will recognize and access single disks. Please refer to your controller
> >   documentation for instructions on accessing drives that are not a member
> >   of any RAID array. 
> ..
> 
> I suppose, of all of the vendors, Adaptec probably has the best chance
> of getting that part right, and probably without randomly writing metadata
> somewhere on the drive simply for JBOD.
> 
> Anyone know for sure ?

To follow up on this, I've now picked up one of these cards, and just did
a quick test. Plugged a drive into an on-board socket, booted, made a copy
of about the first 2MB. Blanked that 2MB out, swapped onto the new card,
booted, made a new copy, swapped back to on-board, booted, and made another
copy. Both copies, and a blank 2MB file, md5sum'ed identically, so it looks
like it's safe.