ICH5R SATA RAID?

[Doug Ambrisko]

Doug White writes:
| On Thu, 1 Apr 2004, Mike Jakubik wrote:
| 
| > Hello,
| >
| > I recently purchased a Supermicro Intel P4 MB w/ 875P chipset (p4sce) with
| > the assumption/hope that serial ata raid would function. However this does
| > not seem so. After managing to install FreeBSD on a pata drive (the
| > bootloader would crash if I used a cd to install when serial controller
| > was enabled, had to use a floppy) and updating to latest ?current code,
| > the raid controller is not recognized. This is what dmseg displays:
| 
| The Adaptec HostRAID mode of the ICH5 is not supported at this time.

Say what?  The ICH5 RAID is SW raid and it nothing more then the 
SATA device with a different device ID when you flip a bit in the
ICH.  It works just like a SATA device since it is.  Intel has a
Promise like RAID bios extension to manage the SW RAID.

Now the Adaptec Chip which is not an ICH is a different beast.

The ICH5-R that the the p4sce is, is not the Adaptec thing.  Now
there is an Adaptec SATA RAID card that I've played with that
seems to work fine with the aac driver.  Don't know if this is
the same that is on HostRAID motherboards.

I have support for this HW in -stable & -current.  I have not looked
at decoding the Intel RAID configuration info.  However, if you are
just doing mirroring you can safely ignore that for the most part.

At the minimum it is just a device ID change to the ICH5 SATA device.
I do have some stability code to deal with SATA errors to prevent
system hangs on media/device errors.

I have a SuperMicro system that does the Intel "ICH5-R" RAID.
I should get inspired via the Linux code and see if I can add
that.  So far I've haved setup the RAID but have turned on the ICH
flag.

Doug A.