Sil 3114 RAID controller issues with FreeBSD 5.3 Release AMD-64 - and Promise RAID controllers???

[Olaf Greve]

Hi,

Last Friday I ranted:

 >In this case, time IS money, so that's why I'm trying to convince my
 >client to better spend that money (and my time) on simply buying a
 >supported hardware RAID controller, which really is a win-win situation
 >for both my client and myself. However, somehow I've not yet been able
 >to drive that argument home, so who knows...:/

Well, eureka, I did it! :)
That is... I managed to convince the client to go hardware RAID. ;)

They have a preference for the following controller: Promise FAST Trak 
S150TX4

But..................................

As far as I gather from the supported hardware list (fbsd 5.3, amd-64) 
at: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/hardware-amd64.html#DISK

It looks like this controller is not supported. :(

To further compound matters, checking the docs on the controller 
suggests that, again, this is basically a software RAID solution (no 
CPU, no on-board memory, and a 66MHz PCI 2.2 32-bit interface): nice to 
complement their otherwise blazingly fast 64-bit AMD machine, duh! :(((

Oh well, again I made a very strong suggestion to buy the Adaptec 2200s 
U320 SCSI RAID controller, but we'll see... :)

Meanwhile, does anyone know of a good hardware SATA RAID controller 
capable of supporting RAID 10, and which is properly supported by 
FreeBSD 5.3 (amd64)? Any experiences? Any do's and dont's?

Tnx & cheerz!
Olafo