Dell PE750 w/SATA

[Doug Ambrisko]

Øyvin Halfdan Thuv writes:
[ Charset ISO-8859-1 unsupported, converting... ]
| Doug Ambrisko, 
| > UEDA Hiroyuki writes:
| > | > I'm planning to set up a system as described below, but I want to hear if anyone
| > | > else on this list has had any experience with a similar setup before I put it
| > | > into production use.
| > | > 
| > | > It is a Dell PE750 with:
| > | (snip)
| > | > - CERC SATA RAID Controller (6 channel) 
| > | 
| > |   Though I have tested Dell PE750 with SATA RAID1(without SCSI) using
| > | FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE-p8, the installer could not find the disk :-(. 
| > | 
| > |   But Ushine Hiroyuki has reported he can boot with some patch derived
| > | from OpenBSD aac code. 
| > 
| > Scott added the PCI device ID's to -current atleast.  I have a bunch of 
| > the CERC SATA cards around here but haven't recently tested them recently.
| > We went with my SATA/ata-raid patches and skipped the CERC card.
| 
| OK. I'll report back if it works well with 5.2.1-p8. Thanks a lot!
| 
| Any other feedback is still welcome if there are any.

I wish Dell made the SATA bays hot-swap and put the Intel RAID BIOS
extension in Dells BIOS.  That way we could boot of a stripe or broken 
mirror.  We do a trick to make both SATA ports be master.  So the BIOS
in general could be richer/better.

Performance is pretty good on the box.

BTW I just stuck one of those CERC cards in a test box and it booted
fine with -current.

Doug A.