lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2008]   [May]   [25]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectMarvell 88SX7042 [4 Port SATA PCI-Express x4] Support/Questions
Jeff has been working on this chipset/patching/etc:
http://forum.soft32.com/linux/PATCH-sata_mv-HighPoint-2310-support-88SX7042-ftopict338643.html

Manual/specs:
http://www.startech.com/Share/ProductSpecs/PDF/PEXSATA24E.pdf
http://www.rosewill.com/RosewillSoftware/UserManual%20for%20RC-218-WEB%20v1.0.pdf

Looks like there are a couple cards sporting this new chip at the moment,
here is one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132018

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marvell_Technology_Group_chipsets#88SXxxxx_SATA_Controllers_Chipsets
It also appears to be supported in the latest kernel.

If one bought enough of these, one could possibly achieve speeds in
excess(!) of 1 gigabyte/second with enough drives and SW RAID in Linux.
Does anyone have such a card? I would be interested if it could sustain
the maximum rate from each disk without any contention.

(with an old 965 chipset for example and a lot of 2-port PCI-e cards)
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=1M
dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null bs=1M

The total read speed increases linearly with each additional disk. Up to
~700-800 megabytes per second with 12 disks (as reported by dstat) (or
vmstat 1).. Same with write (but slower, obviously)...

So my questions are:
1. Does anyone have one of these cards? (not the highpoint with the same
chip) as that is a RAID card.
2. How 'experimental' is it?

Any other comments?

There are motherboards with multiple PCI-e x8 slots (5) if you look around
hard enough, imagine 5 of these cards with 20 hard drives, you could have
one very fast raid array..!

Justin.


\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2008-05-25 14:05    [W:0.044 / U:0.152 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site