Question regarding Intel ICH7 motherboard and integrated RAID

[Maxim Khitrov]

On 9/16/07, Howard Goldstein <hg at queue.to> wrote:
> Karl Denninger wrote:
> > Hi folks;
> >
> > I have a new Intel ICH7 board here that has Quad-core support.
> >
> > It works well EXCEPT....
> >
> > It has an on-board RAID controller with some internal buffer memory.
>
> There's a known issue with an interrupt storm when the ICH7R is
> configured for AHCI or RAID, and a pr was filed back in July(don't have
> the number, search for interrupt storm on atapci1+).  The suspicion was
> that some peripheral no one has identified yet is hammering the apic and
> we can't mask it.
>
> The workaround is to set the BIOS for IDE mode.  It's a bit of a drag
> because SATA-II mode isn't reached when in IDE mode, only in AHCI (and
> RAID?) mode.  If you don't panic when you set it for IDE mode then
> you've probably run into the same problem.
>
> On the plus side FreeBSD on the Q6600 *rocks* and our geom stuff does
> the RAIDdy stuff nicely for a software solution.  I sympathize with you
> as I spent most of the day yesterday trying to work this same problem.

Does this issue affect ICH9R as well? I'm about to get Gigabyte's
GA-P35-DQ6 motherboard (also with Q6600) and was planning on
configuring RAID10 array using the on-board ICH9R chipset. Are you
saying that this doesn't current work (on 7-CURRENT), or that there
are performance issues with such setup?

I need to be able to dual-boot Win XP on the machine, so my plan was
to get 4 320GB drives (later expanded to 6), put them into RAID10
array and that way get good redundancy and performance in both
operating systems. Would you suggest I go about doing this some other
way?