Promise SATA300 TX4302 feedback?

[Vlad Skvortsov]

Mark Kirkwood wrote:
> Vlad Skvortsov wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm looking to buy a Promise SATA300 TX4302 (PCI->[e]SATA) card to 
>> use for external backups on a FreeBSD 6-STABLE system. Can anyone 
>> share their experiences with this one?
>>
>> Also, the box is a pretty old hardware; pardon my ignorance, what 
>> should I check to see if the PCI bus will accomomdate the card? The 
>> card description[1] mentions:
>>
>> # PCI 33/66MHz bus supports up to 266MB/sec burst data transfer rate 
>> (PCI 66MHz)
>> # PCI 2.3 compliant
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> [1]: 
>> http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?segment=Non-RAID%20HBAs&product_id=168 
>>
>>
> Your motherboard needs to be PCI 2.2 or 2.3 complaint according to the 
> manual (you need to tell us what the board is for us to help here). 
> Most should be unless they are very old (later Pentium III Coppermine 
> onwards should be ok).

Thanks Mark -- that's exactly what I was asking for :-)

Is there a way to check this without physical access to the box? dmesg 
doesn't seem to contain this info; pciconf is hot helpful as well.

>
> The physical slot can be either a 32 or 64 bit one (if the latter the 
> card only occupies the 1st half of it) - i.e any PCI slot.
>
> Having said that, Promise support in Freebsd is a little variable - I 
> have not tried the later cards, but had no joy with a TX4000 in a 
> Supermicro P3TDER,  whereas a 3Ware 7506 worked no trouble at all. I 
> would recommend getting a 3Ware SATA card (also they typically are a 
> better card than the corresponding Promise).

Hmm, that's too pricey for me ($250+ range); I was looking for something 
< $100 and without RAID.

It seems that people have no experience with this particular card 
though, so I'll start another thread to find out what other options exist.

-- 
Vlad Skvortsov, vss at 73rus.com, http://vss.73rus.com