On 03/01/2018 09:20 PM, Timothy Pearson wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On 03/01/2018 01:36 PM, Daniel Kulesz via coreboot wrote: >> Hi, >> >> >> (3) put in some PCIe SATA3 card => any recommended chips that respect >> freedom? > There are very few. You can try some of the Marvell devices but you > will still be limited by the host side bus as these old Opterons only > support PCIe v2. >
Marvell and Asmedia controllers on sata cards are kinda garbage, many quirks. Neither respects freedom anyway but a SAS controller crossflashed to IT (dumb) mode (so that it does not have any RAID capability) is the most reliable way to add Sata ports to a board, as SAS is retrocompatible with Sata, and SAS controllers have an entirely different level of quality (both hardware and drivers). >> (4) get a m.2 SSD instead together with some PCIe adapter => the cards don't >> have a co-processor, right? > Yes, they do. NVMe devices have an integrated proprietary controller to > manage data storage / wear levelling. If we go that way, also mechanical hard drives, USB flash drives and pretty much any storage device showing up as "block device" has a storage controller running a proprietary firmware. SSD firmware is more complex and their controllers are very beefy and usually multicore because of performance though. >> (5) stay with SATA2 and live with the limited speed >> >> Any recommendations for a freedom-respecting choice? > Sata2 speed limitation is less bad than it might sound. What matters most for system responsiveness is the transfer speed on random read/writes, which is NOT anywhere near Sata 2 speed cap, more like 20-50MB/s at most on very fast SSDs. Just look up SSD benchmarks for actual stats. The high speed numbers on SSDs are for sequential transfers, for example when you copy over a relatively large file, and that will hit the Sata 2 speed limitation. -Alberto -- coreboot mailing list: coreboot@coreboot.org https://mail.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot