A while ago, I wanted to add more space to my MD+LVM2 array on a Linux machine (Ubuntu 20.04 at the moment).
The setup used MD to make a RAID1 of two HDDs and knowing that I would eventually like to add more storage later, I put LVM2 on top.
A Card That Doesn’t Work
The moment came but I realised my mainboard did not have enough SATA ports. So, after some research, I bought a HighPoint Rocket 640L PICe SATA host adapter which comes with a Marvell 88SE92xx series chip (88SE9230 in my case).
Tl;dr: Don’t.
It took me half a day of research to figure out that (as of September 2021 and Linux kernel 5.4, but I tried 5.14 too) it would not show disks at all if IOMMU was activated. Also, it did not like stand-by/hibernation: HDD 4 would spin up fine on boot, but would not show up after a stand-by rendering the RAID incomplete, and the LVM volume in read-only mode. Which is a nice safeguard, thanks LVM-developers! But still annoying as such of course.
A Card That Does Work
So, I did more research and found the Delock 5x SATA PCIe x4 Card featuring a JMicron Technology chip (with an ID [197b:0585]). And guess what:
- All disks come back after stand-by/hibernation
- IOMMU and virtualisation can be switched on, no problem
- It even has one more port than the HighPoint card
Disclaimer: All this may change in the future. I have no idea if this is a driver problem or a problem with the chip. But I though it might save some of you time.
Conclusion
Don’t use Marvell 88SE92xx series, at least in a Linux system. Full stop.
