Anyone know the support status for SATA3?

[ghmitch]

Two years ago I purchased an inexpensive Syba SATA III card. It seems to be stable at 3Gbs but not at 6. I assumed this card would work fine because most Syba cards in the past have used Silicon Image chipset. I just wrote the card off without doing an `lspci`. But now I went back to do more checking and to my surprise discovered it has an Asmedia ASM1062 chipset. Does anyone know what module supports this chipset? And what the current status of support for this chipset is? Obviously there is some degree of support since I can see the drive, format it and mount it. But it certain didn't deliver the throughput on Mageia 2 without falling all over itself. I really now suspect a driver issue.

At this point I have reviewed all the SATA3 cards on the market I can find. It seems that NONE OF THEM currently include a chipset with viable Linux support. The same seems to be the case to at least some degree with motherboards. The major SATA3 chipset vendors currently seem to be Marvell and Asmedia, neither of which provide the kind of open source driver support typical of Silicone Image who, thus far, have not introduced a SATA3 product. I have seen some interesting forum discussions of these chipsets. For example a discussion in which the participants are trying to figure out why one of these Marvell or Asmedia products are working fine with RHEL and not with other Linux distros. My immediate suspicion would be that enterprise distributions like RHEL would be using a comination of LTS kernel plus propriety binary driver module. In my case this doesn't matter a lot. Any SATA3 hard drive with decent cache should operate unrestrained by SATA2. The people who will really suffer for lack of SATA3 support are those who are using SSDs. At this point the only way to achieve SATA3 speeds would be to use an LSI or Areca RAID SATA/SAS board flashed to IT firmware. But that would likely not provide key SATA features like NCQ. - George

[wintpe]

a quick google about seems to support the fact that these controlers are unstable,
crash, and cant achieve full sata3 performance.

the search's results suggestion not mine......

http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&sclient= ... 00&bih=753

and thats on windows where diver/bios support should be at its best.

for the cost of these things i would not waste the time and effort, or more imporant risk your data , just put it in the bin and get
something different.

the above google about seems to suggest that the intel controlers are the best.

regards peter

[ghmitch]

What I HAVE read is that the main problem with Asmedia SATA3 chips is that they screw up on NCQ. Disabling NCQ seems to clear up the instabilities but for me NCQ is an extremely valuable feature for traditional hard drives and I would rather give up SATA3 for SATA2 than to give up NCQ. And the problem with Intel boards is that they are advertised as working ONLY with SELECT Intel mobos. From the Intel support site: "®The Intel Integrated RAID module RMS25KB080, RMS25KB040, RMS25JB080, and RMS25JB040 do not support 3rd party server boards." They DO however work splendidly with Linux (aside from no NCQ support) because they are based on LSI chipsets, the best and most open chipsets out there. Most of my systems are Intel mobos, but this one is a Supermicro platform and the ONLY Supermicro board with an LSI chipset is a proprietary board that does not even work with my Supermicro mobo ... go figure? I can not tell you how much I hate proprietary designs. That is a huge problem. Once you get on the high end of SATA3, you run into a 4 way compatability conundrum. OS + mobo + SATA card + hard drive ALL have to be compatible with each other. You practically have to build the whole system around storage.