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Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday today. You all made me smile lots. (Yes, I do share a birthday with Karl Marx, and yes, I am now 30.)
I received the SiI3124-based disk controller mentioned earlier, but it didn’t wish me a happy birthday. In fact, it just didn’t work as I hoped. For some reason its on-board option ROM isn’t starting up when the rest of the computer does, so it’s not initializing the disks and making the main BIOS aware of their existence. This prevents me from booting off of them. FreeBSD can talk to the disks on it just fine, but without the BIOS it’s not useful to me.
When I tried the card in my MAME cabinet and it works fine there, so I think something like the following is occurring: The on-board SATA / RAID controller is a SiI3114, and when I disable this via the BIOS, perhaps this somehow disables the SiI3124? Or, perhaps when the controller is enabled, the option ROM from one is interfering with the other? After all, the SiI3114 BIOS still loads and displays. I did also try changing the PCI enumeration order and tried the cards in other PCI-X slots and the lone PCI slot, and none of that produced positive results. The SiI3114 always enumerates first (or not at all?).
As a test I put a classic Adaptec AHA-2940UW (can you believe this card is more than 10 years old at this point?) card in the box and its option ROM displayed just fine. So, the motherboard seems to handle disk controllers in slots, just not this one.
Instead of the SiI3124-based card I really would like a 3ware 9550SXU-4LP, but its $319.99 price tag is a bit hard to stomach. Maybe I’ll just return the card and stick with the onboard controller and software RAID.
Oh, and if you want to see them, there are more photos of the Koutech PSA421 in banstyle.nuxx.net here on page 3 of my gallery.
I have 3 pieces of sii3124-2 based card, tested on 3 boxes. In my experience for those BIOS that can load PCI option rom properly, only 1 instance of the sii3124’s rom will be loaded, no matter how many sii3124 cards are installed. So it is likely that your onboard sii3114 are disabling the addon card’s rom. Presence of other option rom(LAN boot rom, SCSI BIOS etc) do not interfere with sii3124.
So this might work:
– Disable onboard 3114 chip, and make sure the original RAID BIOS no longer loads.
– Install the addon 3124-2 chip
– Enable the new option rom, setup boot priorities etc…..
dilee1: Thanks for the ideas, unfortunately, that doesn’t work. Whenever the onboard 3114 is disabled the 3124 is disabled. There’s just no way to do one the other. When the onboard 3114 is disabled and the 3124 is plugged in, there is no 3124 info displayed during POST.
Btw, FreeBSD 7.0 does not seems to treat the sii3124-2 card as raid card. It sees individual hdds instead of the raid volume created in raid bios. atacontrol complains “cannot recognize metadata format, using software raid instead” etc. YMMV
Yeah, I saw that too. That’s fine with me as I’m using gmirror, I’d just hoped for the SATA2 stuff. It seems that FreeBSD 7.0 doesn’t do NCQ (on that controller?), so it didn’t help much. That reminds me, I should really get around to posting the benchmarks I did of the 3114 vs. 3124. If you’d like to see the raw data it’s available here.