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20060821 Monday August 21, 2006

SunFire X4500 SATA driver Hi, I am Lida Horn, a Solaris engineer who has been working on new driver technology for Solaris 11 (aka Nevada, aka OpenSolaris) and Solaris 10 Updates 2 & 3. This is a new driver for Marvell SATA controllers.

The marvell88sx driver takes advantage of the SATA features and performance including hot plugging and 3.0Gb/sec transfer speeds.

This driver utilizes the new SATA framework which does SCSI to ATA translation. This allows virtually all of the functionality of the sd (SCSI Disk) driver to be utilized. Further, SMART capability is built in for additional reliability.

This driver's benefits are most readily seen on a platform such as the SunFire X4500 (aka Thumper) where 6 Marvell 88SX6081 controllers, each on its own PCI bus, are connected to a disk array of 48 SATA disks. Each disk is 500GB giving a total capacity of 24TB and a combined disk I/O throughput of 3.2GB/sec.

When Sun's new file system, ZFS is used on the platform, the combined system gives a remarkable combination of performance, reliability, availability and capacity. ( Aug 21 2006, 07:26:56 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [4]

Comments:

Will this have any effect on other Sun workstations using SATA drives, such as the Ultra 20 and Ultra 40? It would be nice to give those boxes a bit more performance underload.

Posted by James Dickens on August 21, 2006 at 08:00 PM PDT #

You mentioned that the driver is SMART-enabled. Does it report SMART status to the FMA?

Posted by Derek Morr on August 21, 2006 at 08:41 PM PDT #

Will the new SATA translation layer and goodness help with other SATA technologies on whitebox motherboards for desktops (and servers)?

Posted by James Mansion on August 22, 2006 at 02:21 AM PDT #

The Ultra 20 and Ultra 40 have a different SATA controller (non Marvell). Currently the only two controllers using the new SATA framework are the Silicon Image and Marvell controllers. Work is currently being done for others and is expected to be released soon. As far as SMART goes, the SATA framework supports the reading of the SMART statistics and it is available to any simple application that wants it. The SP on a SunFire X4500 does query the SMART status and will indicate a potential failure. Broader applications of this capability are being worked. As far as "whitebox motherboards", well yes, but not immediately. There was an OpenSolaris talk about the new SATA framework, but the actually interfaces are still not completely solidified. When they are the framework will make it much easier to construct SATA controller drivers for random devices.

Posted by Lida Horn on August 26, 2006 at 10:12 AM PDT #

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