In message <3FB4B16B.6010207@utu.fi>, you write: 

-> Hi all,
-> 
-> I'm going to buy an IDE controller to AlphaStation 500, and I'm
-> wondering which controller would be a good one.
-> 
-> I haven't looked around too much yet, but currently I have found
-> two options: Promise U100TX2 and Maxtor U133.

My experience with Promise controllers on non-x86 platforms has not
been good.  Matt Green and I both had issues with Promise cards in
sparc64 systems (his was one of the U100 ones, IIRC, mine a U66).
Matt ended up using a Silicon Image 680 based controller, and after
his recommendation, I did as well.

With the Promise card, I couldn't pass more than about 2gig between
two drives hanging off the card on my Ultra 5 (each drive was a master
on one of the channels and there were no other devices), as my machine
would panic with what looked like bad accesses to the card's PCI space.
Since I wanted the drives for a mirrored set, this obviously kept me
from even building the mirror set correctly.

I dropped the Sil680 card in (a generic looking taiwanese brand), and
have not had trouble since.  I got the added bonus that the drives can
now do U100, since the Sil680 supports U133, whereas my old Promise did
only U66.  And although the Promise card was free (ripped out of an old
Linux system that didn't support the Promise cards), the Sil680 was only
$25US including shipping.

-> First, the Maxtor uses Promise's PDC20269 chip which seems to be
-> supported, but will NetBSD recognize the card out of the box?
-> 
-> Second, is it sensible to buy U133 to an Alpha@266MHz? Or is
-> the system faster than the disk in any case?

I think it isn't unreasonable, but I wouldn't expect you to be able to
get any better performance from a U133 card than a U100 one; in fact,
I'm not sure any IDE drives can really utilize the extra bandwidth even
in fast x86 systems (but I'm no expert in the area, so I'm sure someone
out there will correct me if I'm wrong...).

-> Third, is the AlphaStation going to be able to boot from IDE
-> (with the latest SRM)? This won't be a problem, though,
-> because I have a spare small SCSI disk I can use for booting.

ENOCLUE here, but I suspect if the answer is "yes" it's only true for
a very limited set of IDE interfaces.

--rafal

----
Rafal Boni                                                     rafal@pobox.com
  We are all worms.  But I do believe I am a glowworm.  -- Winston Churchill