Backporting S-ATA driver SiI 3112a to FreeBSD-STABLE?

[Palle Girgensohn]

Hi,

I've received a bunch of ASUS A7N8X-E deluxe together with Serial ATA hard 
disks. I had planned to run 4.9 on this combo, but it seems the Serial ATA 
support for this driver does not exist before 5.x or so. The controller is 
a SiI 3112a from Silicon Image.

Is there any chance of backporting this driver to -STABLE? At a glance, it 
seems like a lot of work?

We will use these machines as developer workstations, and need them to have 
the same major FreeBSD revision as our customer servers, so we must really 
run FreeBSD 4.x. Hence, I have two choices, either backporting the SiS 
3112a driver from -CURRENT, or trying to get the store to accept trading 
the harddisks for plain old parallel ATA ones.

Also, I've read a few pretty bad judgements about this controller from some 
individuals. Is this true in any way?

Suggestions and input appreciated.

Thanks,
Palle