# Sata PCI card compatability in older p3 PCI only system.



## pgat (Feb 24, 2011)

Hello to all.

I have an older FreeBSD box working fine with four older IDE HDDs (traditional PATA legacy drives). I would like to add (2) Sata HDDs, either (2) 2TB drives or (2) 3TB drives. Anyone anticipate any problems with that capacity? (FreeBSD 7.x).

Planning to get a PCI-hosted SATA card that also has a SATA RAID-1 ability to hardware mirror the first SATA HDD to the second SATA HDD.

There are three fairly low-cost options available to me, like in the $20 or less range, and I'm worried about compatibility. The manufacturers of the SATA cards are listed as "Manhattan" or "Syba". Does anyone use any of these PCI SATA cards with FreeBSD? (The FreeBSD hardware compatibility list only lists chipsets, not the manufacturers?)

Here are the links to the Microcenter pages that describe them:

option 1:
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0335202
option 2:
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0280892http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0280892
option 3:
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0301268

Any advice appreciated.


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## mav@ (Feb 25, 2011)

1) I don't see what chip this card uses. Some points looks like it is SiI3124. If so, card should be well supported.
2) This seems like VIA chip. I suppose it should work, though some users were complaining about reliability.
3) This is Sil3512 chip. It is supported, but that generation known to have some hardware issues.


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## pgat (Feb 26, 2011)

*thx @mav*

I wil try out choice #1 then, thanks for your suggestion, I will see if the Manhattan card works, and yes, it looks like Silicon Image is the chipset manufacturer.

Further question on the BiOS portion. I assume that this PCI card will be able to be configured in the Bios prior to boot as a RAID 1 mirror.. if so, will FreeBSD just recognize it as 1 disk drive?

I assume no problems using either 2TB or 3TB drives..?

Thanks again.


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## mav@ (Feb 28, 2011)

Existing ataraid(4) driver supports many software RAID types, so it may work. But it is not is a very good shape. I am working on better replacement for it now, but Silicon Image support is not ready yet.

I don't know about SiI, but at least for Intel metadata format 3TB disks could be a problem.


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