StarTech 4 Port PCI Express 2.0 SATA III 6Gbps RAID Controller Card
There are some minor issues that needs fixing when using this card under Linux. When booting, you will notice that the boot process will hang for a few minutes if you have this card installed. The reason for this… The Marvell 88SE9230 chipset which does not have a complete AHCI commandset implementation.
Luckily, there is an easy fix, we just need to adjust iommu. And that we’ll do from our grub config.
Now, there are two modes to try out, one is iommu=soft
this will work most of the time
but as that is turning off a lot of the ATA error reporting, this is not ideal.
The second, and the in my case, prefered setting is iommu=pt
. Not only will it fix the
boot issues, but it might also give you a minor performance increase if you use ZFS.
So, on Ubuntu and friends, edit grup sudo vim /etc/default/grub
.
Find the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
and add iommu=pt
for exampel:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="iommu=pt quiet splash"
sudo update-grub
.