Jeff Breidenbach wrote: > I read with interest I. Straford's current trials and tribulations > with the Promise SATA300 TX4. Do people have a favorite > alternative to this card that plays well with Linux? I've read the > chipset compatibility list, but am not sure how to boil that > information down to an actual buyable SATA controller. > > http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-ide@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/msg12398.html > http://linux-ata.org/driver-status.html It's a sort of a difficult question to answer but I think it'll be nice to develop a standard answer to this kind of question and put it on linux-ata.org so that users can choose. It can also hopefully work as another pressure for vendors to enhance their linux support. Anyways, here are what I know. * ata_piix: Although it lacks shiny new features (interface limitation), it should work pretty well. No known serious bugs. * ahci: Well supported. Command switching PMP support is merged for 2.6.24 too. Many (if not most) vendors now use ahci as programming interface for storage controllers, so ahci driver supports lots of controllers from many vendors. Bugginess depends on which vendor or chip you're actually using but in general all are well supported and if you report a problem, it's very likely to get fixed soon. * sata_sil: 3112 chips have problem with early seagate drives but both 3112 itself and those drives have been discontinued for a long time now. There are reports of data corruption when 3114 is connected to mobos with NVidia chipsets. This is still being investigated. If you're on intel mobo, 3112/3114/3512 should work good. * sata_sil24: 3124/3132 chips don't have any outstanding serious problems. IRQ loss on PCI-X was the only recent serious known problem but it's fixed now. These chips are pretty advanced and all the advanced features are supported by Linux including FIS switching PMP support (will be included in 2.6.24 release); however, there is a known hardware performance limitation so you can't use full SATA bandwidth even if you use PMP but it's more than sufficient for most cases and this chip is my personal favorite. * sata_promise: Generally works okay; however there are still some problems with recent 3Gbps chips. (Mikael, please pitch in) * sata_nv: Generally works okay but ADMA support still seems to have some problems (Robert?). * sata_inic162x: Has half-working driver. We need more info from the vendor to proceed further. Stay away from it for now. * sata_via: Works okay. No known serious problems but the chip is quirky and not too dependable when errors occur. * marvell ones: I don't have much idea. Jeff? Mark? -- tejun - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
