Marvell 88SE9128 port multiplier support

[pva]

I'm running 9.0-RELEASE on a HP N36L MicroServer and just bought two CFI-B8253ER DAS enclosures in order to expand my existing ZFS storage pool. The enclosure uses a SiI3726 port multiplier to provide access to the disks through a single eSATA connector. It comes with a SiI3132-based HBA, which seems to be well supported by the siis(4) driver. The disks I'm planning to use are 2 TB Samsung HD203WIs.

However, since the HBA is apparently bottlenecked at 75-88MB/s per port, and I'm planning to connect both enclosures to the same HBA (since PCIe slots are at a premium), I've been looking at more performant options, namely a StarTech-branded card based on the Marvell 88SE9128 chipset, supported by the ahci(4) driver and supposedly (at least according to the above blog post) not bottlenecked at the link level.

Now, I'm wondering how well the SiI3726 port multiplier and Marvell 88SE9128 chipset will play together, especially when I'm planning to use the HBA in a non-RAID mode. Has anyone any experiences or insights to share?

 

[hannibal80]

Hi @pva,

I own the same server and about two years ago I put in 8.2-RELEASE. My configuration is based on five disks, the OS one in the CD slot, the others in the HDD bays. Now I'm running out of space so I'm thinking about adding an external HDD box with four bays to grow the NAS via ZFS. So, I'm really interested in your research, please let me know what you found and what you did with it.

Thanks, bye

 

[mav@]

So far no HBA was able to defeat old SiI3124 chip on multipliers support. Marvell 312x family supports port multipliers with FIS-based switching to give acceptable bandwidth (if used pcie bus permit), but request rate is not highest with them. Stay as far away as possible from Marvell based cards with RAID firmware -- they support multipliers, but on my tests work extremely slow with them.

 

[jem]

I researched the StarTech-branded Marvell card that the OP mentioned, also for use in a MicroServer. My findings were (from another thread):

Looks like the claims of poor performance for that second controller might be well founded.

The Marvell 88SE9128 is a dual SATA 6Gbps to PCI-Express 1x PHY.

Funnelling two SATA 6Gbps channels through a single PCI-e x1 lane isn't going to fit nicely even with PCI Express 2.0 (5Gbps per lane instead of 2.5Gbps).

That StarTech card is basically two of those controllers on one card by the looks of it.

 

[mav@]

Technically speaking, I haven't seen yet port multipliers supporting SATA 6Gbps at all. But yes, faster bus is always a plus there. There are PCIe x2 chips on a market already, but I haven't tested them much -- ones that I've found have that ugly RAID firmware.