marvell sata status?

marvell sata status?

[Jody Belka]

Hi,

I'm looking at buying some new hard drives within the next few months, and
along with them an sata card. One of the cards I've spotted is an Adaptec
that apparently has a Marvell chipset on it (88SX7042), so I was wondering
what the current state of sata_mv is. Is it stable enough for everyday use,
or should I look for something using a different chipset?

Please cc me, as not subscribed to lkml, thanks.


J
-- 
Jody Belka
knew (at) pimb (dot) org

Re: marvell sata status?

[Justin Piszcz]

On Thu, 1 Jan 2009, Jody Belka wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm looking at buying some new hard drives within the next few months, and
> along with them an sata card. One of the cards I've spotted is an Adaptec
> that apparently has a Marvell chipset on it (88SX7042), so I was wondering
> what the current state of sata_mv is. Is it stable enough for everyday use,
> or should I look for something using a different chipset?
>
> Please cc me, as not subscribed to lkml, thanks.
>

Hi,

I cannot comment on that Adaptec card but other cards (without fake-raid 
controllers built on-top of them) with that chipset work great:

Starttech/Rosewill come to mind.

01:00.0 SCSI storage controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SX7042 PCI-e 4-port SATA-II (rev 02)

Star Tech is the "brand-card" I have.

Works as a regular SATA controller.

Justin.

Re: marvell sata status?

[Mark Lord]

Justin Piszcz wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Jan 2009, Jody Belka wrote:
> .. One of the cards I've spotted is an Adaptec
>> that apparently has a Marvell chipset on it (88SX7042), so I was 
>> wondering
>> what the current state of sata_mv is. Is it stable enough for everyday 
>> use, or should I look for something using a different chipset?
..
> I cannot comment on that Adaptec card but other cards (without fake-raid 
> controllers built on-top of them) with that chipset work great:
..

The Marvell 7042 (PCIe) and 6042 (PCI) chips are very stable
and full-featured with the current sata_mv driver in Linux.

The older 6081 and 6041 chips still have issues with Linux,
something I'm working on fixing early in 2009.

Cheers

Re: marvell sata status?

[Jody Belka]

On Thu, Jan 01, 2009 at 09:07:11AM -0500, Mark Lord wrote:
> The Marvell 7042 (PCIe) and 6042 (PCI) chips are very stable
> and full-featured with the current sata_mv driver in Linux.
> 
> The older 6081 and 6041 chips still have issues with Linux,
> something I'm working on fixing early in 2009.

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.


J
-- 
Jody Belka
knew (at) pimb (dot) org

Re: marvell sata status?

[Justin Piszcz]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: TEXT/PLAIN, Size: 815 bytes --]



On Thu, 1 Jan 2009, Jody Belka wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 01, 2009 at 09:07:11AM -0500, Mark Lord wrote:
>> The Marvell 7042 (PCIe) and 6042 (PCI) chips are very stable
>> and full-featured with the current sata_mv driver in Linux.
>>
>> The older 6081 and 6041 chips still have issues with Linux,
>> something I'm working on fixing early in 2009.
>
> 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.
>
>
> J
> -- 
> Jody Belka
> knew (at) pimb (dot) org
>

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.

Justin.

Re: marvell sata status?

[Jody Belka]

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. 



J
-- 
Jody Belka
knew (at) pimb (dot) org

Re: marvell sata status?

[Mark Lord]

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. 
..

One caveat with any such cards:  the onboard BIOS of many "RAID" cards
will scribble over a sector on the drive, to store metadata.

Sometimes *even when the drive is not configured as RAID*,
and sometimes *even when the drive is explicitly set as JBOD*.

The HighPoint RocketRAID cards do this, for example, forcing the
end-user to take great care not to include the overwritten sector(s)
in any partitions or filesystems.  The overwriting happens long before
the Linux kernel is ever loaded, and again at each power-on.

Cheers

Re: marvell sata status?

[Mark Lord]

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 ?

Cheers

Re: marvell sata status?

[Justin Piszcz]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: TEXT/PLAIN, Size: 1873 bytes --]



On Fri, 2 Jan 2009, 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 ?
>
> Cheers
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>

The Star Tech seems to work right, you plug in the disks and they're 
recognized as regular sata disks, as if on your on-board controller.  No 
special modifications required.

Re: marvell sata status?

[Mark Lord]

Justin Piszcz wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Jan 2009, Mark Lord wrote:

>> 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 ?
>>
>> Cheers
>> -- 
>> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in
>> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
>> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>>
> 
> The Star Tech seems to work right, you plug in the disks and they're 
> recognized as regular sata disks, as if on your on-board controller.  No 
> special modifications required.
..

Inconclusive.  The Highpoint cards behave like that, too,
except they silently corrupt a sector (or more) on the drive
at every boot, whether or not one ever "configures" the drive
through the built-in RAID/JBOD BIOS.

???

Re: marvell sata status?

[Justin Piszcz]

On Fri, 2 Jan 2009, Mark Lord wrote:

> Justin Piszcz wrote:
>> On Fri, 2 Jan 2009, Mark Lord wrote:
>
>>> 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 ?
>>> 
>>> Cheers
>>> -- 
>>> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in
>>> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
>>> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>>> 
>> 
>> The Star Tech seems to work right, you plug in the disks and they're 
>> recognized as regular sata disks, as if on your on-board controller.  No 
>> special modifications required.
> ..
>
> Inconclusive.  The Highpoint cards behave like that, too,
> except they silently corrupt a sector (or more) on the drive
> at every boot, whether or not one ever "configures" the drive
> through the built-in RAID/JBOD BIOS.
>
> ???
>

Mark, I had swapped disks between controllers, ICH8, the marvel and SiI 
3132 and never had any problems so is it safe to assume from that-- the 
Star Tech controller did not place any metadata on the disks?

Re: marvell sata status?

[Mark Lord]

Justin Piszcz wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, 2 Jan 2009, Mark Lord wrote:
> 
>> Justin Piszcz wrote:
>>> On Fri, 2 Jan 2009, Mark Lord wrote:
>>
>>>> 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 ?
>>>>
>>>> Cheers
>>>> -- 
>>>> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in
>>>> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
>>>> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>>>>
>>>
>>> The Star Tech seems to work right, you plug in the disks and they're 
>>> recognized as regular sata disks, as if on your on-board controller.  
>>> No special modifications required.
>> ..
>>
>> Inconclusive.  The Highpoint cards behave like that, too,
>> except they silently corrupt a sector (or more) on the drive
>> at every boot, whether or not one ever "configures" the drive
>> through the built-in RAID/JBOD BIOS.
..

Well.. what do *you* think the answer is?

Unless you've zeroed the entire drive beforehand,
and then inserted it into a given controller,
and then scanned for non-zero sectors.. how can you tell?

That's what we ended up having to do with the Highpoint ones,
and the result was rather shocking at the time.

Cheers

Re: marvell sata status?

[Justin Piszcz]

On Sat, 3 Jan 2009, Mark Lord wrote:

> Justin Piszcz wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On Fri, 2 Jan 2009, Mark Lord wrote:
>> 
>>> Justin Piszcz wrote:
>>>> On Fri, 2 Jan 2009, Mark Lord wrote:
>>> 
>>>>> 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 ?
>>>>> 
>>>>> Cheers
>>>>> -- 
>>>>> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in
>>>>> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
>>>>> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> The Star Tech seems to work right, you plug in the disks and they're 
>>>> recognized as regular sata disks, as if on your on-board controller.  No 
>>>> special modifications required.
>>> ..
>>> 
>>> Inconclusive.  The Highpoint cards behave like that, too,
>>> except they silently corrupt a sector (or more) on the drive
>>> at every boot, whether or not one ever "configures" the drive
>>> through the built-in RAID/JBOD BIOS.
> ..
>
> Well.. what do *you* think the answer is?
>
> Unless you've zeroed the entire drive beforehand,
> and then inserted it into a given controller,
> and then scanned for non-zero sectors.. how can you tell?
>
> That's what we ended up having to do with the Highpoint ones,
> and the result was rather shocking at the time.
>
> Cheers
>

One would think if the controller overwrites bits on the device when 
mdadm assembles the raid device it would kick it out of the array for 
being unclean or find a lot of mismatches on the array or is that the 
wrong idea?

Justin.

Re: marvell sata status?

[Mark Lord]

Justin Piszcz wrote:
> 
..
> One would think if the controller overwrites bits on the device when 
> mdadm assembles the raid device it would kick it out of the array for 
> being unclean or find a lot of mismatches on the array or is that the 
> wrong idea?
..

No, there's nothing in mdadm that I know of which will detect this.
You'd basically need to run a job in the background, reading/comparing
all of the mirrors with each other.

But even that mightn't work, since the BIOS would have corrupted the
exact same sector on every drive attached to it, quite possibly with
the same contents, so the mirror-compare wouldn't see anything different.

The only way to know for sure is to test it manually,
by zeroing the entire drive, power/reboot, scan the entire
drive for non-zero.  Then repeat with a different pattern
just in case "zero" is what the BIOS wrote.

Very very messy, at least for the Highpoint RAID cards.
But we really don't know about what the others do,
apart from some historical data in the dm code.

Cheers

Re: marvell sata status?

[Mark Lord]

Mark Lord wrote:
> Justin Piszcz wrote:
>>
> ..
>> One would think if the controller overwrites bits on the device when 
>> mdadm assembles the raid device it would kick it out of the array for 
>> being unclean or find a lot of mismatches on the array or is that the 
>> wrong idea?
> ..
> 
> No, there's nothing in mdadm that I know of which will detect this.
> You'd basically need to run a job in the background, reading/comparing
> all of the mirrors with each other.
> 
> But even that mightn't work, since the BIOS would have corrupted the
> exact same sector on every drive attached to it, quite possibly with
> the same contents, so the mirror-compare wouldn't see anything different.
> 
> The only way to know for sure is to test it manually,
> by zeroing the entire drive, power/reboot, scan the entire
> drive for non-zero.  Then repeat with a different pattern
> just in case "zero" is what the BIOS wrote.
> 
> Very very messy, at least for the Highpoint RAID cards.
> But we really don't know about what the others do,
> apart from some historical data in the dm code.
..

Oh, and from the existing sata_mv.c driver code:

if (pdev->vendor == PCI_VENDOR_ID_TTI &&
    (pdev->device == 0x2300 || pdev->device == 0x2310))
{
   /*
    * Highpoint RocketRAID PCIe 23xx series cards:
    *
    * Unconfigured drives are treated as "Legacy"
    * by the BIOS, and it overwrites sector 8 with
    * a "Lgcy" metadata block prior to Linux boot.
    *
    * Configured drives (RAID or JBOD) leave sector 8
    * alone, but instead overwrite a high numbered
    * sector for the RAID metadata.  This sector can
    * be determined exactly, by truncating the physical
    * drive capacity to a nice even GB value.
    *
    * RAID metadata is at: (dev->n_sectors & ~0xfffff)
    *
    * Warn the user, lest they think we're just buggy.
    */
   printk(KERN_WARNING DRV_NAME ": Highpoint RocketRAID"
           " BIOS CORRUPTS DATA on all attached drives,"
           " regardless of if/how they are configured."
           " BEWARE!\n");
   printk(KERN_WARNING DRV_NAME ": For data safety, do not"
           " use sectors 8-9 on \"Legacy\" drives,"
           " and avoid the final two gigabytes on"
           " all RocketRAID BIOS initialized drives.\n");
}

Re: marvell sata status?

[Jody Belka]

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.