On Fri, 14 Nov 2003, Rafal Boni wrote:

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

Thanks for this info. I did find a cheap Sil ATA133 controller also.
Have to double check that it actually is supported by NetBSD, but
I guess I'm going to buy that one, then.

> 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.

Not that I'm actually going to need that kind of use necessarily,
but it's good to know that Promise can be problematic (somehow
I was under the impression that it's good generally?).

> -> 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...).

Yeah, and anyway I won't actually be needing any stellar performance.
And I can also actually pick U133 cards cheaper than e.g. Promise's
U100 card here in Finland. Dunno what's up with that, but I guess
it's just a good thing :)

  -- Arto