In article <20020626063555.GA23758@sea.clarity.net>,
Adam Glass <adam@clarity.net> wrote:
>Anyone out there using IDE hardware RAID in 1.5.x?  I'm wondering if I
>can get the RAID 1 and hot-swap functionality out of a built-into-
>the-motherboard Promise PDC20265 controller if NetBSD interfaces with
>it through a generic driver? [1]  That is, is a RAID-savvy driver
>required to get RAID functionality (disabling/rebuilding drives), or
>is that handled transparently by the firmware?  (If it's the latter,
>how is the RAID behavior configured?)  Does the pciide driver support
>full UDMA, or is it going to fall back to one of the slower PIO modes?
>
>I've never played with the Promise stuff before -- any opinions?

Not very happy with the promise; their bios did not recognize large
disks (> 40GB, circa 2000/2001 when I tried it). On the smaller disks where
it worked, it was fine. And I don't think that the bios was upgradable.

>Alternatively, the 3ware 7210 controller [3] has been highly
>recommended... does NetBSD 1.5.x have drivers for it?

I don't know if 1.5.x has it, but 1.6 does. RAID 5 is a dog [5X slower
than the same raid on a dell/perc controller with u160 disks]... 3ware
has been pretty good with firmware and driver updates (on linux only
of course).

christos