SATA300 Controllers

[Mike Horwath]

On Wed, Jul 05, 2006 at 08:02:55PM -0500, Derrick T. Woolworth wrote:
> Sorry for cross-posting, but these issues seem relevant for lists...

That's okay, I am not on all and I'll create some bounces, I am sure.

> Has anyone had success with SATA300 controllers with FreeBSD 6.1?
> I've been trying Promise and nVidia nForce4 and I'm not having any
> luck.  Using a MSI K8NGM2-L motherboard and others, but 6.1's
> installation hangs as soon as it sees ad4.  I've also tried using an
> Adaptec 1210SA controller and had zero results.  I've read that the
> chipset on this controller is not very good - forces serialized
> access to the controller's channels???  Nevertheless, I've got a K8N
> Diamond motherboard on a workstation and I was able to at least
> "start" the 6.1 installation.  I have no idea if its stable.  At
> this point, I'd settle for just knowing "which" SATA300 controller
> to use that will work successfully and "well" with FreeBSD 6.0 OR
> 6.1.  Another question, would I have more success installing 6.0 and
> then upgrading the kernel and recompiling with a build-world?

I am running 6.0 and 6.1 systems (-STABLE) with both ARECA 12xx cards
and 3WARE/AMCC 9550SX cards.

Neither are cheap, but they are doing the job and are in use in binary
spoolers for news.

> I'm currently trying to build a moderate large system with 4 presentation
> servers, 2 database servers and one large storage system using NFS mapped to
> ~1.2 terrabyte of SATA disks (4x Maxtor 500GB 7200 RPM disks w/RAID5
> config).  Any suggestions?

Up the # of spindles? :)

-- 
Mike Horwath, reachable via drechsau at Geeks.ORG