linux-kernel - Marvell 88SX7042 [4 Port SATA PCI-Express x4] Support/Questions

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Date:	Sun, 25 May 2008 08:03:22 -0400 (EDT)
From:	Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@...idpixels.com>
To:	Jeff Garzik <jeff@...zik.org>
cc:	linux-ide@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-raid@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Marvell 88SX7042 [4 Port SATA PCI-Express x4] Support/Questions

Jeff has been working on this chipset/patching/etc:
http://forum.soft32.com/linux/PATCH-sata_mv-HighPoint-2310-support-88SX7042-ftopict338643.html

Manual/specs:
http://www.startech.com/Share/ProductSpecs/PDF/PEXSATA24E.pdf
http://www.rosewill.com/RosewillSoftware/UserManual%20for%20RC-218-WEB%20v1.0.pdf

Looks like there are a couple cards sporting this new chip at the moment, 
here is one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132018

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marvell_Technology_Group_chipsets#88SXxxxx_SATA_Controllers_Chipsets
It also appears to be supported in the latest kernel.

If one bought enough of these, one could possibly achieve speeds in 
excess(!) of 1 gigabyte/second with enough drives and SW RAID in Linux.
Does anyone have such a card? I would be interested if it could sustain 
the maximum rate from each disk without any contention.

(with an old 965 chipset for example and a lot of 2-port PCI-e cards)
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=1M
dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null bs=1M

The total read speed increases linearly with each additional disk.  Up to 
~700-800 megabytes per second with 12 disks (as reported by dstat) (or 
vmstat 1)..  Same with write (but slower, obviously)...

So my questions are:
1. Does anyone have one of these cards? (not the highpoint with the same 
chip) as that is a RAID card.
2. How 'experimental' is it?

Any other comments?

There are motherboards with multiple PCI-e x8 slots (5) if you look around 
hard enough, imagine 5 of these cards with 20 hard drives, you could have 
one very fast raid array..!

Justin.
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