Marvel 9172 Controller Support?

[Bizquick]

Is Marvel controllers still bad to use in unraid with array drives?

I only ask because my ASRock WS246 Board has 4 extra Sata ports using a Marvel 9172 controller.

I was trying to trim down not using my HBA controller. But I could stick with using it because I'm using onboard GPU from the processor. But It would be nice to not have to use one of my PCIe slots just to hook up all the drives I would use.  If its still an issue kind of surprised I would have thought something would have improved by now.

[JorgeB]

9 hours ago, Bizquick said:

Is Marvel controllers still bad to use in unraid with array drives?

Generally yes, but some do work reasonably well, you can try.

[Bizquick]

This is the chipset on the motherboard.
Marvell SE9172: 4 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s, support RAID 0, 1, 5, 10

and a link to my mainboard if that helps. I dont want to start using it and find out later.

https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=C246 WS#Specifications

I'm planning on a redoing my system to use a ZFS Data array instead. And if I use that controller for that I wouldn't want to risk seeing drives falling offline. I would end up with issues with my zpool etc...  I just figured that this has been a long time known issue that somebody must have figured out how to improve driver support by now.

 

 

 

 

 

[ChatNoir]

5 minutes ago, Bizquick said:

somebody must have figured out how to improve driver support by now.

That would be on Marvell to provide working drivers for the linux kernel.

 

Some companies do (Intel for example), some don't (Realtek).

[Bizquick]

Some what true. Linux is open source so sometimes vendors leave it up to the community to help build support or improve on it.

[JonathanM]

On 12/3/2023 at 5:39 PM, Bizquick said:

Some what true. Linux is open source so sometimes vendors leave it up to the community to help build support or improve on it.

Hard to properly implement open source drivers when the hardware is closed source.

[Bizquick]

Totally agree I think its the Catch 22 there. The hardware Dev's don't want to spend time on the open source because not getting paid for it. And the community is limited to what it can see to help them. I think I'm just going to wait till I upgrade again and then use this board and test the Marvel 9172 controller ports in a backup box to test with. So it might be another year I guess.