suggestions for SATA RAID cards

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Friday 25 August 2006 01:52, Nikolas Britton wrote:
> > I believe Promise *do* support FreeBSD quite a bit.
>
> Maybe as an after thought. I also don't see any link on their site for
> FreeBSD support, lets check google:

<shrugs>
cvs log ata-chipset.c..
----------------------------
revision 1.21
date: 2003/05/01 06:20:50;  author: sos;  state: Exp;  lines: +144 -7
I'm pleased to announce that Promise is now supporting the FreeBSD
project by providing documentation (under NDA) and hardware for
testing. This commit is the first result of the cooperation, and
adds support for several of their new controllers that we didn't
support before (and probably newer would have without this arrangement).

Add support for the Promise SATA150 TX2/TX4 and the Promise TX4000
controllers. This also adds support for various motherboard fitted
Promise SATA/ATA chips.
Note that this code uses memory mapped registers to minimize overhead.
I belive FreeBSD has made another first in the Open Source world
by being able to release support for this :)
----------------------------

I don't ever download drivers from a companies website for FreeBSD so I 
couldn't care less if they're mentioned on it :)

> http://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Awww.promise.com+FreeBSD
>
> http://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Ahighpoint-tech.com+FreeBSD
>
> So 7 Links Vs. 90 Links. Also if you click on that first link google
> gives you, about the up coming RAID6 SuperTrak EX4350 and EX12350 with
> support for FreeBSD etc.. Those card are clones of Areca's ARC-1210
> and ARC-1230 cards... Striped down clones at that, they only have a
> 500MHz XScale IOP333... Areca is already moving from the 600MHz XScale
> IOP333 to the 800MHz XScale IOP341 with DDR2-533 support... Hell I bet
> they're just going to patch arcmsr(4) and call it there own. Areca's
> Erich Chen put a lot of work into arcmsr(4). There wouldn't be an
> arcmsr(4) in FreeBSD if it wasn't for Areca commitment to support
> FreeBSD. Now we have Promise trying to claim they support FreeBSD by
> patching a few lines of code from another company. Butch of BS is what
> that is.

Erm, I think "paranoid conspiracy theory" covers this.

Just because they use the same chip doesn't mean the driver will magically 
work.. The CPU on the RAID card runs a program and that program is what 
defines the interface with the OS.

ISTR 3ware cards have XScale's on them too.. Perhaps Areca cloned them! 
</sarcasm>

Promise cards have been supported for much longer than Areca (longer than 
Areca has actually existed as a company?) and it is my understanding they 
regularly supply Soren with documentation and hardware.

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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