SATA on FreeBSD-4.x

[Dan Strick]

On Sat, 15 May 2004 16:14:28 +0300, Rumen Telbizov wrote:
>>
> - RocketRAID 154x/1640 S-ATA Controller driver Version 1.11s
> - chipset hpt374
>
>   ...
>
> Drivers for FreeBSD are provided from the HighPoint.
> I downloaded the driver (kernel module) from the
> HighPoint site!
>
>   ...
>
> > Can you boot off your HighPoint card?
> Sure I can! But ...
> 
> The default BIOS of the RAID controler
> was for ATA (PATA) and not for SATA (stupid isn't it!?).
> I wasted 5 hours trying to find out what was wrong, until
> I finaly decided to take the final BIOS from the site
> and flash my card. After this everything was fine.
>
>   ...
>
> One last thing: just for your information - I am 
> running RAID 1 (for 1 month) without any problems.
> The card supports hardware raid that could be re/build
> with sysctl commands.
>>

Thanks for the info.  It is good that there seems to be a PCI SATA card
that seems to work well in FreeBSD-stable.  Do you by any chance know if
the RAID mirroring function is implemented in the controller or in the
driver?  If it is implemented in the hardware, it is possible that during
disk writes the data is transferred across the PCI bus only once for both
drives rather than once for each drive.

Dan Strick