Asus A8N-E: only SATA 1.x

[Z300M]

I am coming to the conclusion that it was a waste of money to buy more memory (fortunately used, on eBay) for this A8N-E board to run FreeNAS.

1. The max of 4GB is the bare minimum for ZFS and doesn't allow prefetch.

2. As has already been reported and verified, it is impossible to get the networking running at Gigabit speeds.

3. Now that I have already ordered an Intel PCIe NIC for it, I have noticed that it reports only 1.5Gb/s disk transfer speeds (SATA 1.x ). I know that I saw SATA II transfer speeds when I had Windows running on this board, because the speed jumped up when I removed the speed-limiting jumpers from the drive I was using at the time. The new drives I bought are SATA III, and I realized that I could expect only SATA II speeds until I upgraded the other hardware later on (and I bought them as much for the longer warranty as for the greater speed), but to see only SATA I speeds is extremely disappointing.

 

[mav@]

I've seen cases when some combinations of 3Gbps controller and 6Gbps disks (or opposite) could negotiate only 1.5Gbps. In case of 6Gbps controller (and 3Gbps disk) forced limitation to 3Gbps on controller side could help to get 3Gbps.

But to be sure that situation is really the same as you described it would be nice to see full verbose boot log. To get it you should boot typing 'boot -v' in loader prompt.

 

[Z300M]

The boot log shows that the devices are recognized as SATA 3.x, but transfers are at 1.x speeds.

 

[mav@]

I am asking about verbose logs to get know better what controller are you using, how it is detected and some other reasons.