suggestions for SATA RAID cards

[Nikolas Britton]

On 8/23/06, Willem Jan Withagen <wjw at withagen.nl> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've ran into sort of a snag with building a 2T file server.
> Given all the good press here for 3ware and the talk to the guys at the CeBIT
> I decided to go for a 9550SX-LP8.
> With that I bought a ASUS serverboard: K8N-LR with 165 dual core opteron.
>
> In itself is this a combo that I thing would do for a long time at my home. ;)
>
> However the 3ware controler decided not to play nice with 2 of the PCI-X
> boards I have here. It gets stuck in the bios disc scan.
>

Disable int 13. The card is probably trying to load it's boot BIOS and
another card is interfering with it... I had a Promise card that loved
to f**k with my HighPoint controller. The solution to the problem was
disabling int 13 on the HighPoint card by re-flashing the cards BIOS
with a special switch set, I didn't need to boot from this card
anyways.

> So I'm looking for alternatives with good support under amd64. I've seen that
> the Adaptecs are supported under aac(4). But what about Promisse or Highpoint
> RAID controllers?
>

Stay away from Adaptec and Promise because they don't support FreeBSD.
I would recommend Areca and/or HighPoint because they do officially
support FreeBSD. 3Ware does support FreeBSD but I don't have
experience with their cards so I can't say anything good or bad about
them.

If you want to go 64-bit Areca drivers are open source and the FreeBSD
man page states that they work on amd64.


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