# Think a siig DP SATA 4-port controller would work (Marvell 88SE9230 chipset)



## grep2grok (Oct 9, 2015)

I ran up against the limit of my old SAS controller and suddenly find myself in the market for a 4-port SATA PCIe card. Only thing at Fry's is this Siig. It's based on a Marvell 88SE9230 chipset, which I don't see in the FreeBSD supported devices list, but Marvell 88SE61xx is. Close enough?


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## robroy (Oct 9, 2015)

grep2grok, my Supermicro 5017A-EF has a Marvel 88SE9230 SATA chipset, and it works fine for me (with 10.1-RELEASE), yet I only have two small SSDs hooked up to it.

From /var/run/dmesg.boot:


```
ahci0: <Marvell 88SE9230 AHCI SATA controller> port 0xe050-0xe057,0xe040-0xe043,0xe030-0xe037,0xe020-0xe023,0xe000-0xe01f mem 0xfe310000-0xfe3107ff irq 21 at device 0.0 on pci1
ahci0: AHCI v1.20 with 8 6Gbps ports, Port Multiplier not supported
ahci0: quirks=0x900<NOBSYRES,ALTSIG>
```

At least in the form it's in on my Supermicro board, the 88SE9230 has a JBOD mode, and a hybrid RAID mode; I use JBOD mode.  Here are a couple of screenshots of its firmware setup interface.


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## grep2grok (Oct 9, 2015)

Thanks. After installing the card, my boot loader runs but finds the OS disks with new device names and refuses to boot. Luckily this is a fresh install, so no loss, but seems squirrelly to me... Why would the card force the OS drives plugged into the motherboard to acquire different device names (da0 => ada4)?


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## kpa (Oct 9, 2015)

grep2grok said:


> Thanks. After installing the card, my boot loader runs but finds the OS disks with new device names and refuses to boot. Luckily this is a fresh install, so no loss, but seems squirrelly to me... Why would the card force the OS drives plugged into the motherboard to acquire different device names (da0 => ada4)?



Labels are your friend:

http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/labels.html

Unfortunately FreeBSD lags behind other BSDs in this regard and doesn't default to unique labels for disks and partitions. For example on OpenBSD the default install writes an /etc/fstab using  DUID (Disklabel UID) based names that are guaranteed to be unique across possible disks and configurations.


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## kpa (Oct 9, 2015)

If you're using GPT partitioning you're better off using GPT labels. The labels guide written by wblock@ seems to assume MBR partitioning where UFS labels are the way to go. He has another guide where GPT labels are explained:

http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html


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## grep2grok (Oct 9, 2015)

Interesting. I installed with guided root-on-zfs. Does that affect anything?


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## diizzy (Oct 18, 2015)

Avoid Marvell, if you add-on that isn't LSI go with ASMedia.
//Danne


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## User23 (Oct 19, 2015)

diizzy said:


> Avoid Marvel



I am curios why you say that . Any general problems with the controllers or did I missed something general about Marvell chips?


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## diizzy (Oct 25, 2015)

Ahh, sorry. Because they're buggy controllers ;-)
//Danne


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