RocketRaid 2640x4 FreeBSD 7.1

[Mraoul]

So I have a FreeBSD 7.1-Stable amd64 machine in which I recently tried to install a Highpoint RocketRaid 2640x4 card into. The card seems to be recognized by the motherboard just fine (Intel P965 chipset) and I'm able to enter the card's utility to modify/setup drives and arrays. The way I want to use the card is pretty simple; I'd just like it to show the drives as individual drives (no raid or JBOD) since I use zfs and the drives I'm planning to hook up to these are already part of a pool.

There is no built-in driver for this (even then since it's highpoint it'd probably have a blob in it anyway), so I'm using a kernel module provided by Highpoint on their site.

The main problem I'm having is that drives are not recognized in FreeBSD unless they are part of an array/JBOD. So if I hook up a drive to the card I'll see the card being recognized (and it'll mention it probing the drive) but it won't add a /dev/da entry (nor an ad entry). So I decided to try and put the drive into a JBOD. After JBOD-ing the single drive I booted back up into FreeBSD and the drive was recognized as da0. I rebooted, destroyed the JBOD, rebooted again and the drive was no longer there.

So anyone ever use this card or a similar card and have a similar problem?

 

[Mel_Flynn]

Why do you install a raid card if not planning to use raid? The card hides the drives from the OS, as it's expecting to add them to the raid configuration.

 

[Mraoul]

Why do you install a raid card if not planning to use raid?

There are a very limited selection of sata controller cards that have an x4 interface and last time I checked all of them are "raid" cards. Even the cheapest cards do raid now (albeit totally in software and I'm pretty sure this one does it in software too). Also there aren't exactly many x4 cards that are relatively affordable. This was an inexpensive solution for what I wanted.

The card hides the drives from the OS, as it's expecting to add them to the raid configuration.

Um I'm pretty sure that's not how it always works, even the cheapest raid cards have the ability to do a "legacy" or an auto-jbod mode for the drives they see. I've used at least 10-15 sata/sas raid cards over the years(most of them at work) and *all* of them have this capability. Admittedly I usually stick to some upper-tier brands such as promise or 3ware.

After emailing highpoint support I received my answer and I don't really like it.

Here's the body of their email:

You would need to create individual (single-disk) JBOD arrays if the disks have not been used previously. If the disks contain a valid partition table, they will be recognized as Legacy drives (these do not have to be configured with the card's interface).

Honestly this is the first time I've seen a card that automatically assumes a drive is going to be part of an array unless otherwise specifically stated. As I mentioned in my post the drives I'm going to hook up are part of a zfs pool, which means they're already configured as such and I'm pretty sure when zfs adds a member to the pool it doesn't bother to create a valid partition table as it doesn't need it. Yes I could probably write a valid partition table so It's detected as legacy but what happens when I want to add another drive? I'd have to set it up on a different machine or different controller and then hook it up.

Also after doing some googling, I found some message boards that mention that some of highpoints cards (they mention the 23xx series) writes a code to some sector (8 or 9 or something) indicating that the drive is a "legacy" drive, which doesn't really sound like a good thing to me as minor as it might be, since they have no idea what is on the drive but proceed to modify it anyway.

Looks like I'll be returning this and sticking to the brands I know.

 

[kama]

I know this thread is old, but I thought I'd mention that I have a Highpoint 4320 that, if you go into the BIOS for the card, allows a mixed mode in the controller section: RAID and SATA disks on the same card. I haven't messed around with it, but I'm pretty sure that's what you're looking for.