suggestions for SATA RAID cards

[Mark Kirkwood]

Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> 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 :)
> ----------------------------
> 

While this is true, Promise support seems somewhat problematic for the 4 
port cards - I have a TX4000 which FreeBSD (4,5,6,7) consistently see no 
disks attached to - ever, and a SX4060 that gives ATA semaphore timeouts 
and 'danger Will Robinson' no matter what disks are attached to it... so 
neither of these are any use to me for FreeBSD, unfortunately (I gave up 
and installed Gentoo on the box with the TX4000).

By comparison, I have a 3ware 7506 which works perfectly.

Admittedly, this is all pretty old HW, but I believe there are still 
similar issues with *some* newer Promise SATA cards....

Cheers

Mark