Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 25 May 2008 08:03:22 -0400 (EDT) | From | Justin Piszcz <> | Subject | Marvell 88SX7042 [4 Port SATA PCI-Express x4] Support/Questions |
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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.
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