[geeks] Serial ATA

[Shawn Wallbridge]

Greg A. Woods wrote:

>[ On Friday, August 16, 2002 at 11:58:32 (-0500), Shawn Wallbridge wrote: ]
>  
>
>>Subject: Re: [geeks] Serial ATA
>>
>>Well the big problem with most Promise 'RAID' controllers is that they 
>>are just IDE controllers and the actual RAID is done in the drivers
>>    
>>
>
>Well, "Duh."  :-)  That's only a marketing problem, not a technical one.
>(unless your boss was fooled into buying one on false pretenses and you
>now have the technical challenge of dealing with the consequences :-)
>
I just threw them on the shelf and ordered real cards ;-)

>
>  
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>>(and 
>>why the support for them is binary only)
>>    
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>
>I don't know a lot about these cards, or Promise products in general, but
>I do know that NetBSD-1.6 (in "Release Candidate" state right now) will
>support their Ultra{33,66,100,133}/ATA Bus Master Accelerator models
>(PDC20246, PDC20262, PDC20265/PDC20267) plus the Ultra100TX2[v2]/ATA Bus
>Master IDE Accelerator (PDC20268), though the latter with the following
>caveat:
>
>     The core wdc doesn't support modes higher than Ultra-DMA 5, so the
>     Promise Ultra/133 is only used at Ultra/100.
>
>I presume that'll be "fixed in the next release" :-)
>
>If those are the cards you're talking about then NetBSD supports them
>with the cross-platform pciide(4) driver.
>  
>
But those are just their normal IDE controllers. The Promise FastTrack 
RAID controller is 'different' (the only difference is a resistor and 
the drivers).

>  
>
>>The 3Ware cards have worked well for us. Huge ass storage for less money 
>>(2TB server for $10k CAN). We have tried SCSI array's (8-73GB Hitatchi 
>>10k drives in a Sun 711 connected to an Adaptec 3210S w. 256MB cache) 
>>and the performance was about the same (except 4 out of 8 of the drives 
>>died within a week). So we are going back to IDE raid.
>>    
>>
>
>That's good to hear!  Thanks for posting your experience!
>
No problem, I really think they are good cards, so I like spreading the 
word.

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>>3Ware just released a 12 port IDE RAID card which sounds nice. 
>>    
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>Wowza!
>
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>>As for OS support, it's pretty good. While they only support Linux and 
>>Windows, their drivers are completely open, so any OS could be supported 
>>given the interest (and willing and competent programmers). The 
>>management interface is a Linux binary, but almost everyone has Linux 
>>binary emulation (ok, well maybe not, but it seems like it). I know the 
>>cards work in OpenBSD, so I can't see the rest of the BSD's not 
>>supporting it (or at least for long).
>>    
>>
>
>NetBSD 1.6 (and 1.5.3) has the "twe" driver from FreeBSD, which claims
>support for the "3ware Escalade family of RAID controllers."
>  
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I figured, but I didn't look, so I didn't want to say. That's probably 
where OpenBSD got the code.

>  
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>>One really nice thing, I just read that you can move from a 6x00 series 
>>card to a 7x00 series card without having to rebuild the array. To me 
>>that is a big deal because the 6x00 series are not made anymore and they 
>>are getting hard to find (and we have 4 that I worry about finding a 
>>replacement for if they die).
>>    
>>
>
>Indeed that is a big deal -- very impressive.
>
>  
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I thought so. It shows they a) care about their customers or b) didn't 
change much in the format.

After talking to one of the engineers personally (he even built a 
special flash utility for me, since their stock utility only handled one 
card (no one else had run two before)) I really think they are a good 
company that actually cares about their customers. They even changed 
their mind about cancelling the whole escalade product line after enough 
people called.

shawn