From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1762112AbYEYMDf (ORCPT ); Sun, 25 May 2008 08:03:35 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1758340AbYEYMDY (ORCPT ); Sun, 25 May 2008 08:03:24 -0400 Received: from lucidpixels.com ([75.144.35.66]:60508 "EHLO lucidpixels.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755229AbYEYMDX (ORCPT ); Sun, 25 May 2008 08:03:23 -0400 Date: Sun, 25 May 2008 08:03:22 -0400 (EDT) From: Justin Piszcz To: Jeff Garzik cc: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-raid@vger.kernel.org Subject: Marvell 88SX7042 [4 Port SATA PCI-Express x4] Support/Questions Message-ID: User-Agent: Alpine 1.10 (DEB 962 2008-03-14) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; format=flowed; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org 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.