TLER/SCT through HighPoint 620 (non-RAID) controller

[cjdavies]

I now have all the parts for my NAS (see below) & have started assembling & testing.

Fractal Array R2 case+PSU
Intel S1200KPR motherboard
i3 3240 processor
8GB ECC RAM
HighPoint Rocket 620 (non-RAID) controller
3x 2TB Samsung F3EG
3x 2TB WD Red

The WD Red disks come with TLER set to 7 seconds (checked by booting a linux image & using smartctl). The F3EG have TLER disabled by default but can be set to 7 seconds with smartctl & retain this setting as long as power is on (eg even through reboot). What I intend to do is boot a linux image, use smartctl on the F3EG, then reboot into FreeNAS.

However I discovered that I can't run smartctl on any disk I attach to the HighPoint controller. I can simply attach 2x of the WD Reds to the controller, as they already have TLER set to 7 seconds, but can anybody confirm whether the controller blocking SCT will affect what happens if a read error occurs?

I chose the controller from a recommendation on this page (which is supposedly highly regarded by this community?) so would be rather disappointed if I have to replace it! http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=10

 

[jgreco]

Can't confirm or deny what you're seeing. However, as to the blog post, I would comment that it is wicked hard to find good hardware that does exactly what you want and does it without caveats, especially if you're doing something "odd" like FreeNAS where we often want a large number of ports (typically the realm of RAID controllers) that function as standard SATA ports. There are various people who are making kind efforts to share whatever they learn, but there aren't really any guarantees that every device will work the way we'd prefer. I would certainly encourage you to add a comment to the blog post, or contact the author, to identify any limitations you discover...