RAID 5 Adapters and FreeBSD 5.2.1

[Patrick Hurrelmann]

adam at otterycomputers.com wrote:
> Hmm well the cheepest 3ware RAID 5 SATA card is about £240 which is like £100
> more than my budget would strecth too, shame those 3ware cards look real nice.
> Also I think they are 64bit pci, i only have 32bit pci :-(
> 
> Im guessing that mmy best bet then is to get some sort of supported SATA
> controller and then to use Vinum on top to do the RAID stuff. Can anyone make a
> well supported but under £140 recommendation.
> 
> Shame coz those promise ones look wicked and fit my budget.
> Can anyone tell me how difficult it would be to develop a driver for the promise
> card, I have experience of C and C++ amongst others and am fairly knowledgable
> about PC's and Hardware but have never had to look so low-level as writting a
> driver.
> 
> Thanks Adam.
> 

I forgot to mention, that Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 (and SX4000) are 
supported in 5.x CURRENT, but they use the ata-framework and no scsi. 
Radi 5support will hit 5.x in future. Soeren Schmitt is working hard on 
it. But it may take some time till this happens. I own a Promise 
FastTrak S150 SX4 myself and i have killed my old raid5 array some days 
ago. i now use 4x 120gb as raid 0+1 with ataraid.

It's sad, that Promise still advertises his FastTrak SX4 with future 
FreeBSD support. I spoke with an technician of Promise on Cebit 04. It's 
highly unlikely that Promise itself will release any bsd drivers. They 
have a linux-driver. I received a copy of it, too. Regrettably the 
Promise driver is only partly open-source. I provided Soeren with one 
copy, but he said it doesn't help him, as the relevant parts of the code 
are closed...


so, at the moment i'm running CURRENT with raid 0+1 on my Promise SX4 
till ataraid will handle raid5. Looking forward to that.

Patrick