SiI 3112 time out problems and suggestions for a good sata controller.

[Gary D. Margiotta]

> The machine this is running on has releng_5 on it.
>
> I was wondering if any one had any suggestions on a good for a good
> sata pci card that preferably has 4 connectors on it.

The standard well supported RAID cards under FreeBSD as I have 
experienced:

Promise, HighPoint, and 3Ware.

I've used Promise and HighPoint cards so far, and I have an older 3Ware 
58xx card waiting to go into a server I'm starting to get parts for.  I've 
had zero issues with any of these 3 manufacturers so far, and the cards 
that I have used have all served me very well over the past few years. 
FreeBSD has support for most of the controllers (except for the brandy-new 
ones, which usually get supported pretty quickly with the -STABLE 
branches) right out of the box.

Promise cards I think are all "soft" RAID cards, meaning I haven't seen 
any of their lines of cards with a dediated hardware chip for RAID-5 (in 
particular).

HighPoint offers both types of controllers (their "A" series, i.e. 1810A 
for the 4-port version, are the hardware-based ones), and I think 3Ware 
are all hardware-based.

I believe the SiI 3114 boards are a little better than the 3112 (I don't 
think you can get any worse than the 3112), but I would stick with the 
above 3 vendors, you will get well supported controllers that will work 
without much fiddling.  I think 3Ware has the best monitoring utilities, 
but if you're going to not bother with the card itself and use gvinum, 
then it really doesn't matter.

Hope this helps.

-Gary