RAID 5 Adapters and FreeBSD 5.2.1

[adam at otterycomputers.com]

Interestingly I emailed promises Europe and US Support departments and they both
gave me different and conflicting answers.

Rather stupidly the european department seem to think that FreeBSD is some sort
of linux distribution. Also the European department say that planned support
for FreeBSD has been dropped by management whereas the US department say that
development for FreeBSD is currently under way!!! Crazy?

Here is what the European department said -
=======================================
Hello mister Retter,

Honestly, we took FreeBSD in the shedule to get drivers developed for this,
and created a manual, however management decided later that this linux
distribution would not be supported. Thus we did not develop specific driver
for this model.

We know that some linux enthousiast have developed drivers for this model in
Free BSD, but you have to check this in newsgroups.

With kind regards, Mit freundlichen grussen, Met  vriendelijke groet,

Stefan Zegers
Technical Support Engineer
=========================================

The US Support department said this -
=========================================
Hi
	FreeBSD driver for both controllers are still being developed
and tested at this point. I don't have a date as of yet when driver will
be out.

I would recommend you not to purchase the controller until Promise have
FreeBSD driver posted on our website.



Thank you

Promise Technology Inc
1745 McCandless Drives
Milpitas CA, 95035
408-228-6400
==========================================


So anyone know whats happening? Not me!

Cheers Adam.




> adam at otterycomputers.com wrote:
> > Hmm well the cheepest 3ware RAID 5 SATA card is about £240 which is like
> £100
> > more than my budget would strecth too, shame those 3ware cards look real
> nice.
> > Also I think they are 64bit pci, i only have 32bit pci :-(
> >
> > Im guessing that mmy best bet then is to get some sort of supported SATA
> > controller and then to use Vinum on top to do the RAID stuff. Can anyone
> make a
> > well supported but under £140 recommendation.
> >
> > Shame coz those promise ones look wicked and fit my budget.
> > Can anyone tell me how difficult it would be to develop a driver for the
> promise
> > card, I have experience of C and C++ amongst others and am fairly
> knowledgable
> > about PC's and Hardware but have never had to look so low-level as writting
> a
> > driver.
> >
> > Thanks Adam.
> >
>
> I forgot to mention, that Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 (and SX4000) are
> supported in 5.x CURRENT, but they use the ata-framework and no scsi.
> Radi 5support will hit 5.x in future. Soeren Schmitt is working hard on
> it. But it may take some time till this happens. I own a Promise
> FastTrak S150 SX4 myself and i have killed my old raid5 array some days
> ago. i now use 4x 120gb as raid 0+1 with ataraid.
>
> It's sad, that Promise still advertises his FastTrak SX4 with future
> FreeBSD support. I spoke with an technician of Promise on Cebit 04. It's
> highly unlikely that Promise itself will release any bsd drivers. They
> have a linux-driver. I received a copy of it, too. Regrettably the
> Promise driver is only partly open-source. I provided Soeren with one
> copy, but he said it doesn't help him, as the relevant parts of the code
> are closed...
>
>
> so, at the moment i'm running CURRENT with raid 0+1 on my Promise SX4
> till ataraid will handle raid5. Looking forward to that.
>
> Patrick
>




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