Re: Re: [9fans] Any one going to change to sata disks?

["Jack Johnson" <knapjack@gmail.com>]

On 6/29/06, Francisco J Ballesteros <nemo@lsub.org> wrote:
> Amazing. Similar story here. We ended up with one sata disk as sdC0
> and one ata (500G) disk as sdD0. If we plug in anything else (including cd)
> the bios hangs.

Has anyone looked at the 3ware controllers, instead of supporting the
random chipsets on the various motherboards?

http://www.3ware.com/products/index.asp

They act like SCSI controllers, which might return some of the sanity,
and hardware RAID is always nice.  Plus, plenty of open source driver
implementations.

No idea on the quality of the source, but performance under Linux is
good. I usually use  RAID 10, but I think it's StorageReview that has
a fair review that notes pretty good RAID 5 performance:

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200111/20011119Escalade7450_1.html

Two-port cards start around $140 or so -- about an order of magnitude
more than the competition -- but definitely with the 4-port cards and
up I've found the price to be worth it.

-Jack

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http://www.3ware.com/kb/attachments/FreeBSD6_driver_source_9550SX-GUID1e41dd6deab5404fac46976c7e166c33.zip

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twa driver

URL: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/twa/
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/modules/twa/

Contact: Vinod Kashyap <vkashyap at amcc.com>

A newly re-architected twa(4) driver was committed to 6 -CURRENT on
04/12/2005. Highlights of this release are:
1. The driver has been re-architected to use a "Common Layer" (all
tw_cl* files), which is a consolidation of all OS-independent parts of
the driver. The FreeBSD OS specific portions of the driver go into an
"OS Layer" (all tw_osl* files). This re-architecture is to achieve
better maintainability, consistency of behavior across OS's, and
better portability to new OS's (drivers for new OS's can be written by
just adding an OS Layer that's specific to the OS, by complying to a
"Common Layer Programming Interface (CLPI)" API. If there's interest
in porting the 3ware driver to any other OS, you may contact ctchu at
amcc.com to get a copy of the CLPI specifications.
2. The driver takes advantage of multiple processors. It does not need
to be Giant protected anymore.
3. The driver has a new firmware image bundled, the new features of
which include Online Capacity Expansion and multi-lun support, among
others. More details about 3ware's 9.2 release can be found here:
http://www.3ware.com/download/Escalade9000Series/9.2/9.2_Release_Notes_Web.pdf

( from http://kerneltrap.org/node/5035 )

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