Re: nForce2 RAID MCP (SATA) support?

On Wed, Dec 22, 2004 at 08:48:31PM -0700, John Nielsen wrote:
> On Wednesday 22 December 2004 01:22 pm, Brooks Davis wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 22, 2004 at 01:15:46PM -0700, John Nielsen wrote:
> > > Hi folks-
> > >
> > > I'm trying to find out if there is support for integrated nForce2 RAID
> > > MCP SATA controller already or planned in the forseeable future.
> > >
> > > I'm setting up a system with an MSI K7N2 Delta2 Series motherboard. 
> > > Booting from 5.3-R, the controller is detected as a generic ata
> > > controller and runs the disks at UDMA33.  I'm actually quite impressed
> > > by the hardware even without a specialized driver, but I'd like to know
> > > what to expect in terms of support.
> >
> > This RAID controler requires a software RAID implementation.  We do
> > support the necessicary RAID functionality, but apparently we don't
> > support the meta data used by your BIOS.  All your average onboard RAID
> > system does is allow you to boot from a mirror or strip.  Once you're
> > booted, it's up to the OS to read the geometry data from the disks and
> > proceed with software RAID support.  Since there's no standard for the
> > on-disk metadata, we only support those systems were we've managed to
> > pry the data out of the manufacture or reverse engineer the format.
> 
> That's understandable.  I don't have an immediate need for RAID support 
> though.  What would be needed to simply have the controller recognized and 
> able to support UDMA 150 (or even 133)?

At least in current, there's an nForce2 MCP device id that is supposed
to support UDMA6 so I suspect you may just need to wait a bit and it
will arrive.  It's possiable you have a board with a non-standard
PCI-id.  You might make sure "pciconf -lv" shows that your controler
shows a device ID of 0x008510de.  If not, you may be a simple matter of
adding it to the necessicary two lines.

-- Brooks

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