Freenas and sata chipsets

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tangmonster

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Hi i have been messing with freenas for the last 2 months getting to know it , even install an rss plugin for the bittorrent client.

I am using an older single core 3Ghz p3. It currently has 2 x 2TB western digital WD20EARS

cpu: single core 3Ghz p4
hdd: 2 x WD20EARS and 1 x older seagate 500gb ide.

I am running into trouble with the two wd20ears drives on the onboard via chipset i keep getting dma read errors and failures.

I then plugged in the cheap via 6421 pci card and basically things went from bad to worse.

My current sitaution is that when i stream series or movies to my media centre pc things work but on the system log i can see the dma read errors stacking up to MANY MANY errors. But it works fine.

Copying to the drive gives me no errors but reading from it gives errors.

It is so bad that i can't copy from one drive to the other on the NAS even over slow samba windows share copy. Internal copy fails EVERY time.
but randomly even upon stacking dma read errors the file copies fine and file is fine no corruptions.


I have been doing a lot of googling and it seems the problem is just that there is problems with freebsd and certain chipsets.

I don't want to pay R1000 for a pci raid card because i don't need raid. But if this thing goes down and my wife can't whatch grey's there will be problems!

So my question:

do people have an idea of a cheap sata pci card with about 4 sata ports that i can get that works with freenas?

I know
promise sata300 tx4 works but except for a few sales on ebay they seem impossible to find.
it also seems promise sata150 II tx4 will work

according to this and a few other links http://www.freenaskb.info/kb/?View=entry&EntryID=253
the silicon image 3114 chipset will work although people report that on high loads they still see a few read failures.
This chipset i see is used on the sunix cards that i see for sale in SA.
Although it seems they need a firmware update from the manufacturer to work.

Anybody got any good ideas? or even possibly a second hand card for sale?

thanks for your help

 
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