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Marvell 88SX7042 chipset Info


totenkopf4

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Greetings All... Just a Note to let you know of some hardware I came across some time ago that I placed into a Xpenology system I am building.

Currently had a old Gigabyte GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3 motherboard w an Intel I3 Cpu. W 8 gig ram. and 6 Seagate ST4000DM005's. All connected to the onboard SATA ports.

 

I also have a "Rosewill RC-218 PCI Express SATA II Controller Card w/ 4 internal SATA with 2 external eSATA Design" which is no longer in production but I wanted to comment on it due to the Marvell no raid chip. 

It has a Marvell 88SX7042 chipset on it .. this is a NON raid card but was not sure if It would work.   As info on this chipset was rather limited in my GOOGLE search for compatibility w Xpenology and or Synology.

There are other PCIe cards that are SATA 3 and have been tested "I/O Crest 4 Port SATA III PCI-e 2.0 x1 Controller Card Marvell 9215 Non-Raid with Low Profile Bracket SI-PEX40064" which is available on Amazon. But as this system is mostly all SATA 2 even w SATA 3 drives It was not a concern, Since we are doing a proof of concept here.

 

The Onboard jumpers are set up for 4 internal HDD and no eSATA connection. And when it was plugged into the MB and booted up, the Synology System saw the controller and its one attached HDD in the DSM Storage Manager . So it is looking good .

My intention is to add two SSD's and two more 4 GIG HDD to this and use this in this NAS and evaluate SSD caching.

 

Current configuration was created Bare Metal using Juns Bootloader  DS3615xs 6.1.2 Jun's Mod V1.02b and the associated DSM. It w DSM_DS3615xs_15284.pat file and then updated via DSM manual updates (update 2) - DSM 6.1.7-15284 Update 2 is current. DSM update tells me that we have an update 3 available. Holding off on that for now.

 

SO just wanted to post that the Marvel 88SX7042 chipset appears to work w DSM and Xpenology.

Also I did not do any editing of the conf files to configure this system for more that the current 12 ports that it sees. ( which I believe is default for this model of Synology)

When all the ports have been added It will have 10 physical Drives 8 mechanical and 2 SSD's.

Controller was added and was seen by the OS. Like it was Plug and PLay.....

Thanks

Update this was not tested in a 5.0 or 5.2 Xpenology system only the 6.1.x as listed .....Not sure if this Marvell chipset has been set up in the older Xpenology OS's. As my Google search didnt get many hits on these values it subject to testing or trial and error ... your mileage may vary!

 

 

Edited by totenkopf4
DSM 5X
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  • 3 months later...

Ok some more on this chipset ... currently this card  - Rosewill RC-218 PCI Express SATA II Controller Card w/ 4 internal SATA with 2 external eSATA ports (which is a 4x PCIe card).  Was also listed by this name as well "StarTech PEXSATA24E 2 Port eSATA + 4 Port SATA II PCI Express x4 SATA Controller" Both cards look and behave the same w the exception of the name of the device.

As mentioned I tested this in two systems the above one w the Z68 motherboard and used a 4x PCIe slot which the card will use. And it worked very well.

Since then I have purchased an MSI B170 motherboard which has only a 16/8 bit PCIe lot and a lot of the PCIe 1X slots (4). Tested this again w two cpus a celeron and an I5 Skylake w/o problems.

In both builds used Jun's loader w the B150 Bazooka MB using the DS3615xs 6.1.2 Jun's Mod V1.03b loader  and no problem w the Marvell Chipset driver. Did have issues w his latest Loader (not 1.03b) which would not provide a network connection ... I believe this was due to the manufacture using a Realtek 8111H chipset for the onboard NIC . I have not used an Intel PCIe1x GB nic to test this which could be done. So if you need to have more SATA ports these cards will work there is no RAID BIOS  on the Rosewill or the StarTech now we have another card that you may find - IBM Marvell Controller Card DB-MV88SX7042-PEX SLM-566-V1 this has the chipset but it appears to have a BIOS chip on it so this needs to be known.

 

You need to know that if you  using older computer motherboards that these SATA 2 spec cards will work w the onboard SATA 2 ports or even some of the mixed versions motherboards that have both SATA 2 and SATA 3 ports.  IN my case I have a bunch of SATA 2 HDD  2TB that will work on all ports. So having this card in a system like the MSI B150 with all 6 sata 6gb ports is not a problem. As the Drives will downgrade the speed due to there limits. So if you have a main board w all SATA 3 (6GB speed) then using this card w SATA 2 PORTS adds some slowness to your RAID or SHR pool of drives, its better to keep it as close to the same speed as  you can.

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