I went out today and picked up a 1x PCIe eSATA card made by SIIG (model SC-SAE412-S1) and put it in my OpenSolaris dev box. As expected, the si3124 driver picked up on the Silicon Image 3132 chip on this card and was fine with it. Now I just need to get a multi-bay external SATA disk box to hook up to this card so I may continue with my NAS appliance project.
It seems that the non-RAID SATA/eSATA cards made by SIIG are all based on either the SI 3124 (for PCI/PCIX) and 3132 (for PCIe) chips, so they’re a safe bet if you’re looking for such a thing for your Solaris 10/OpenSolaris box, as the si3124 driver (part of the SATA framework) should jive with it.
cfgadm -al output with a Maxtor STM3500630AS disk attached to each of the two eSATA ports on this card:
Ap_Id Type Receptacle Occupant Condition sata0/0::dsk/c7t0d0 disk connected configured ok sata0/1::dsk/c7t1d0 disk connected configured ok
/usr/X11/bin/scanpci output:
pci bus 0x0002 cardnum 0x00 function 0x00: vendor 0x1095 device 0x3132 Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3132 Serial ATA Raid II Controller
Those two disks are now a mirrored set in a ZFS pool:
[daleg@helium]~$ pfexec zpool status local
pool: local
state: ONLINE
scrub: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
local ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
c7t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c7t1d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
It works!
I’m on the same track as you are w/ the home NAS box :)
My ingredients:
Shuttle SFF SN25p (Athlon X2, 2GB)
IOI PCI-e 1x SATA II Card (Sil 3132)
Raidon SR-3620 (2 bay RAID-1/0 external sata enclosure)
Raidon ST-6600 (5 bay external sata enclosure, w/ port multiplier)
The SR3620 is there for my boot drive (RAID-1), and the ST-6600 will be housing 5x500GB Deskstar drives. So far I’ve gotten things partially installed and have found weird occurences of intermittent freeze of the sata controller.. I’ll be posting more of my progress once I’ve done more thorough test\troubleshooting on my problem to be able to properly describe it… (and of course only if there’s anyone out there interested w/ this info).
Cheers,
JS
Links:
http://www.raidon.com.tw/sohoraid%20sr3610.htm
http://www.raidon.com.tw/sohotank%20st6600.htm
Hi, any follow up on the success of building a solaris system that uses external esata storage? Thanks much.
–Peter
Is there an update to this?
I have been looking for an eSATA+port multiplier+ZFS solution. Looks like I must use Solaris/OpenSolaris for the most robust/mature ZFS implementation, but the issue has been finding reports that make me feel safe before buying all this hardware…
Doesn’t seem like many people have done this yet (or at least they’re not getting Googled…)
Thanks
Hey Dale,
This maybe a tad late to ask but am just now looking into putting a PCI (66mhz) eSata card into a Sunfire server running Solaris 10. The board doesnt support PCI-e so need a 66mhz card. The only ones I am seeing made by SIIG in that flavor have chipset Initio 1620. Do you know if this works with the Sata framework of Solaris10? Get back to me whenever you can. Thanks
Jason