What hardware supports SATA-II/NCQ disks?

jontoo

I have gone out and bought me some very recent disks with SATA-II and NCQ. (Hitachi T7K250)

I didn't realize at the time that there was an issue with support, actually just stupidly assumed "SATA is SATA and that's the end of it."

Well my motherboard (Gigabyte 7NNXP) has a silly old Silicon Image 3112 chip which doesn't have NCQ. Furthermore, the current driver for it (sata_sil.ko) (I currently use kernels 2.6.9-**) deadlocks and hangs the whole system after a certain amount of disk activity.

In other words: Sil3112 + sata_sil + NCQ drive = choke, then freeze. :cry:

First an optimistic question: Is there a (reasonably well performing) way to run NCQ disks on Sil3112 with Linux ?

Realistic question: What PCI card should I buy to make my new disks run (PERFECTLY) with Linux 2.6 ?

I know about this link:
http://linux.yyz.us/sata/sata-status.html

But I can't really figure out the best thing to buy or even a product from that..

Thankful for any useful info on this....

Apreche · Guru Joined: 18 Sep 2003 Posts: 506 Location: Beacon, NY

I'm farily certain that NCQ is compatible with whatever the drive is compatible with. It is entirely something that is within the drive itself, and what controller you have or motherboard you have it doesn't matter.

However, SATA II and SATA 150 are completely different. From what I can tell SATA 150 is usually what people mean when they say SATA. SATAII is something newer, faster and rarer.

jontoo · Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2005 3:34 pm Post subject:

Yes but NCQ is mostly only implemented on SATA-II controllers.
If it was something entirely within the drive itself, then how can different controllers claim support for NCQ ?

Also SATA-II is multiple things in one, but I know that it makes 300MB/s, NCQ and staggered spinup standard features. Now my disks (see original post for model) are SATA-II, but should be backward compatible. It seems that's the part that doesn't work currently. The question is, can it work with the Sil3112 or will I have to buy a new SATA-II card ?

I guess I misformulated myself a bit, thought this would be a much more known problem..
Will write more about the specific problem I have when I get home from work.

How can I retrieve the dmesg from last run? The bloody thing deadlocks and then the next reboot overwrites the dmesg-log...

Thanks

Mankale · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Jan 2004 Posts: 76

the only chipset in integrated SATA-II support I know of is nVidia nForce4. That said I'm not sure if the version for AMD CPUs supports it, but the one for Intel does.

Apreche · Guru Joined: 18 Sep 2003 Posts: 506 Location: Beacon, NY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_command_queueing
It seems I was correct in that the drive does all the work for NCQ. But I did not realize that there was a need to toggle a flag on the controller to enable the NCQ. However, there is no reason an NCQ drive would not work on an old controller, the NCQ would simply be disabled.

Some more research indicates that SATA2 is in fact backwards compatible with SATA1(SATA 150). That means an SATAII drive should work on an SATA controller at the slower speed. However, for the SATAII to we worth anything you would need to have a compatible controller.

As for the relationship between SATA2 and NCQ, there is none. Seagate sells numerous SATA1 drives with NCQ.

The reality seems to be that while your SATA2 drives should work at the slower speed, the linux driver has no support for drives with NCQ on your controller. To be certain if it is the Linux driver or incompatible hardware that is causing your problem I reccomend you try to run windows to see if the driver will work, if that is possible. If that's not an option then you should probably just return the SATAII drive to get a normal SATAI drive and be done with it. Less effort that way.

If you really want an SATA2 PCI controller that will work in linux that's more difficult. Not only will the selection be limited, it might even be 0 at this point. All I can say is to go look in the newest kernel to see which cards there are modules/drivers for. If any of those are SATA2 then you're in luck. Googling gives some reference to some expensive PCI Express SATA2 RAID controllers that exist and work in Linux.

If you want to see dmesg from last boot, that's kind of difficult. Your best bet is to write a script like

jontoo · Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2005 9:27 pm Post subject:

kingmoffa · Posted: Thu Apr 27, 2006 11:53 am Post subject: Any more?

Hi ,

Im also looking to get into the world of sata. I have a dual CPU system (mythtv) that I would very much like to get NCQ working on.

Can anyone suggest a SATA-II PCI controller that will work with a newish linux kernel? (That wont cost hundreds of UK pounds)

http://linux-ata.org/sata-status.html suggests

"AHCI (newer Intel ICH, ULi, others)
Summary: Full NCQ support, full SATA control including hotplug and PM."

Anyone know any AHCI based controllers?

Thanks for your help.

Adam