Marvell SATA card with SSD/HD tiering?

[file_haver]

Hey everybody,

I happened to need an extra couple sata ports in my FreeNAS machine and just by my luck, in a box of free stuff someone left on the corner of the street, i spotted a sata card, got a SYBA SY-PEX40052 2 port 6gb/s card!

I googled and saw no reports of it with FreeNAS or BSD, so i found it has a Marvell 88SE9130 chipset, i've seen some threads for other Marvell chipsets having questionable support, and usually the replies happen to be that so-and-so should have looked at the recommended hardware list, but this was completely free to me.

It worked when i put it in one of my spare PC's to test it, and according to this thread it should work fine in FreeNAS.

So if FreeBSD recognizes it fine, i know it's not recommended card but is there any risk using it? data corruption is what i would be worried about.

I plan on getting one of the recommended SAS controllers soon and running all my drives off that but this would be really nice to hold me over until I make that investment if it's not going to destroy my volumes. And even when i do get a recommended SAS card, would there be any reason i shouldn't use this card to hook up other drives?

Lastly i wanted to ask if the built in SSD/HD tiering function built into the Marvell controller is of any benefit to a FreeNAS user in any way. However i don't expect to run any SSD's in my NAS, so i doubt there is much use for me here.

Thanks in advance!

 

[jgreco]

The tiering is useless. FreeNAS is your RAID controller and does all that for you in software.

I do not suggest relying on information gleaned from Linus Tech Tips, a great place to peruse for things not to do, but generally not reliable for actual good, sound advice.

FreeBSD (and FreeNAS) will recognize lots of things and appear to work just fine with it, but the real question is will it do so under all conditions, reliably, including adverse conditions such as error handling. Unfortunately, this is really hard to know for a small sample size. The reason we recommend the LSI HBA's are because there are billions of hours of problem-free operation with these across the FreeNAS userbase over many years. These things have proven themselves.

The 88SE9130 *might* be just fine. It's just not proven. But it is also possible that it isn't fine. ZFS is highly resistant to data corruption and it is very unlikely that the Marvell would corrupt your data beyond ZFS's ability to repair it.

We typically burn in gear here for hundreds, usually thousands, of hours before deployment, which helps increase the confidence level that the hardware doesn't have any unusual issues. You might wish to do the same sort of thing to help gain confidence in the Marvell.

 

[file_haver]

Thank you for your insights @jgreco !!

I'm glad to know ZFS is strong enough to overcome data corruption. I'll try using the card for a while in the machine on non-essential drives and see how it does.

I do not suggest relying on information gleaned from Linus Tech Tips, a great place to peruse for things not to do, but generally not reliable for actual good, sound advice.

;):D:p

 

[Stux]

I would be concerned about the card suddenly offlinung 2 drives. If you have multiple vdevs maybe spread only one drive from each vdev onto the card

 

[Johnnie Black]

I've been using a controller based on the same chipset for over a year without major issues, though I don't really trust Marvell controllers, and wouldn't use one on a non checksum enable filesystem, I needed 4 extra ports and since I already owned it decided to try it, I was kind of expecting problems but it has been working fine, I did have one FreeNAS crash that I suspect was related to it, but even if it was I can live with one crash in a year, especially with ZFS since any data corruption would be detected on the next scrub, if not sooner.

Another possible issue with these cheap controllers is that they aren't all the same, they can use the same chip but be poorly made and have more problems, though Syba is probably one of the best and you should be fine.