Joe Reid
2014-10-24 15:46:48 UTC
If you type man -k sata at a Solaris 11.2 command prompt (imagine that, reading the documentation), the OS indicates there are drivers for the Si Image 3124, Marvel 88SX, Broadcom HT1000, Nvidia ck804/mcp55 and Areca SAS/SATA RAID controllers.
I a few years ago I bought a PCI SiI3124 card (without realizing how limited my driver selection actually was, got lucky I guess) and it worked well with 2 WD green label 500Gb drives and 2 WD green label 320Gb drives, until I lost a hard drive the other day. I took that opportunity to purchase 2 new WD green label 2Tb drives and install them. It worked fine for a few days then everything went to pot. I passed a handful of emails back and forth with the controller board vendor (SYBAUSA/IOCREST) who indicated that in JBOD mode there is no reason those (2Tb) drives shouldn't work. I have even purchased a PCIe version of my SiI3124 card. Still nothing works right. The machine behaves for a little bit but any significant amount of disk i/o, mostly running format analyze compare, and the whole system's disk i/o bus freezes. Running processes that don't need disk access continue to work, but as soon as the disk is accessed that terminal hangs. Hard boot is the only solution.
I have reinstalled the OS. I have cleared NVRAM on the motherboard and re-configured the BIOS. I have disabled every motherboard controller device that is not in use. As SYBAUSA's advice I even flashed both the PCI and PCIe controllers with the newest SiI BIOS. All to no avail. There is an IRQ conflict with the PICe Si3124 board, but it is with one of the USB controllers and there is nothing on that USB controller, only keyboard and mouse (via USB KVM) on the whole usb bus. The drives do not seem to be the issue, I have put them on another machine in a sata/usb enclosure and they work fine, I have run format analyze verify on them attached to my Solaris machine's motherboard controllers (on-board Intel ICH7R and an on-board SiI 4723) with no issues (nothing attached to the SiI3124), I am currently running format analyze compare on the 2 2Tb disks attached to the motherboard controllers now, with the SiI3124 card(s) removed. Last night I tried this last test with the 2 320Gb drives also while attached to the PCIe card and the system hung.
Does anyone have any experience with the SiI3124 chipset and 2Tb drives? No one makes controller cards with the Marvell 88SX chipset anymore (it's PCI-X), everything is now 88SE (PCIe). Does anyone have any experience running a newer 88SE chipset with the 88SX drivers? Does anyone have any experience with the Broadcomm or Nvidia chipsets, and can recommend a controller card (PCI or PCIe x1) to get? I don't really have the money to go the Areca route...
I a few years ago I bought a PCI SiI3124 card (without realizing how limited my driver selection actually was, got lucky I guess) and it worked well with 2 WD green label 500Gb drives and 2 WD green label 320Gb drives, until I lost a hard drive the other day. I took that opportunity to purchase 2 new WD green label 2Tb drives and install them. It worked fine for a few days then everything went to pot. I passed a handful of emails back and forth with the controller board vendor (SYBAUSA/IOCREST) who indicated that in JBOD mode there is no reason those (2Tb) drives shouldn't work. I have even purchased a PCIe version of my SiI3124 card. Still nothing works right. The machine behaves for a little bit but any significant amount of disk i/o, mostly running format analyze compare, and the whole system's disk i/o bus freezes. Running processes that don't need disk access continue to work, but as soon as the disk is accessed that terminal hangs. Hard boot is the only solution.
I have reinstalled the OS. I have cleared NVRAM on the motherboard and re-configured the BIOS. I have disabled every motherboard controller device that is not in use. As SYBAUSA's advice I even flashed both the PCI and PCIe controllers with the newest SiI BIOS. All to no avail. There is an IRQ conflict with the PICe Si3124 board, but it is with one of the USB controllers and there is nothing on that USB controller, only keyboard and mouse (via USB KVM) on the whole usb bus. The drives do not seem to be the issue, I have put them on another machine in a sata/usb enclosure and they work fine, I have run format analyze verify on them attached to my Solaris machine's motherboard controllers (on-board Intel ICH7R and an on-board SiI 4723) with no issues (nothing attached to the SiI3124), I am currently running format analyze compare on the 2 2Tb disks attached to the motherboard controllers now, with the SiI3124 card(s) removed. Last night I tried this last test with the 2 320Gb drives also while attached to the PCIe card and the system hung.
Does anyone have any experience with the SiI3124 chipset and 2Tb drives? No one makes controller cards with the Marvell 88SX chipset anymore (it's PCI-X), everything is now 88SE (PCIe). Does anyone have any experience running a newer 88SE chipset with the 88SX drivers? Does anyone have any experience with the Broadcomm or Nvidia chipsets, and can recommend a controller card (PCI or PCIe x1) to get? I don't really have the money to go the Areca route...