FreeBSD 6.0 as storage server with raid5?

[Daniel Eriksson]

Joseph Kerian wrote:

> Hmm... I have to ask if you (or anyone else) has actually done this. 
> I attempted to run two Highpoint cards in the same machine about a
> year ago, and the Highpoint driver became extremely confused. They
> were nowhere near the same card (one was IDE, the other was a 1640),
> but the driver seemed to be having difficulty seperating the drives.

I'm running two RocketRAID 454 cards (4 channel ATA = 8 disks each) in
one of my servers. There is however explicit support for doing this in
the BIOS/firmware on these cards.

> Only one of the setup screens would appear on boot.  I tried different
> combinations of PCI slot locations and specific instructions to the
> driver to no avail.  I ended up using g/vinum for the IDE drives.
> I don't exactly remember the other card's model, but the 454 
> looks likely.

The disappearance of the BIOS/firmware config for your card(s) is not a
FreeBSD problem unfortunately. It has to do with how resources are
allocated by the motherboard's BIOS. I have a Tyan Tiger 2466M mobo
myself (dual Athlon MP) that I have populated with a SCSI card, a dual
port Gbit NIC and two RocketRAID 454 cards. To get it to boot I had to
use a jumper to forcefully disable the onboard 100Mbit NIC. And I still
cannot boot off of a floppy without first disconnecting at least one of
the cards.

You could try to update the BIOS on your motherboard. Some motherboards
also allows you to disable BIOS/firmware loading for certain PCI slots.
This could help free up some resources for cards that you don't boot
from.

/Daniel Eriksson