On Tue, Oct 04, 2005 at 10:38:15PM +0200, Jan Danielsson wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I'm confused.
> 
>    A friend of mine and I are trying to put together a new
> NetBSD-system, but we got stuck. Last time I put a completely new system
> together, I bought all SCSI. SATA didn't even exist. Needless to say,
> times change...
> 
>    We decided to go for SATA for this system for economic and
> performance reasons. That's about as far as we have got.
> 
>    We want to have two raided (mirrored) SATA drives in the system, and
> one or two more separate harddrives (that's three to four drives in total).
> 
>    Correct me if I'm wrong, but "plain" SATA means one harddrive per
> channel?

yes

> So, a normal motherboard with basic SATA support (two channels)
> means two harddrives maximum?

Yes. But motherboards with 4 SATA ports are not uncommon.

> 
>    I read that there's something called a "Port Multiplier" which will
> allow 16 disks to be connected to a single channel, but afaik, that's
> only valid for SATA2? Can SATA and SATA2 disks be mixed on a SATA2
> controller?

On different channels, yes. But I don't think Port Multiplier will work out
of the box with NetBSD.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--