In message <199906260054.UAA24826@ghost.whirlpool.com>, you write: 

-> I would love to hear about anyone's experiences with these controllers,
-> especially with NetBSD. :)

This is only tangentially related, but since Thor has chimed in with
his opinion, I'll add mine.

We bought one of Promises' motherboards with the built-in RAID support
for a linux fileserver at work in hopes of building a cheap IDE RAID
system.  We bought 8 x 20GB drives for this.

The problem seemed to be lack of understanding between the linux IDE
drivers and the promise controller cards.  When we attempted to build
the RAID using the Promise hardware, the linux kernel still saw the
individual drives, rather than the one big virtual disk we were expecting.

Seeing as NetBSD has no specific drivers for the Promise cards, you might
end up in the same boat, where the RAID card thinks it's combined all the
disks into one unit, but the kernel still sees the individual components.

We ended up skipping the hardware RAID and using the linux software RAID
in the end, and things now work OK, although without the benefit of the
hardware...

(ObExcuse: I didn't set up the box, else I'd have installed NetBSD on it 8-)

--rafal

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Rafal Boni                                                  rafal@mediaone.net