In message <442C1ABB.8050403@johnrshannon.com>,
"John R. Shannon" writes:
>Manuel Bouyer wrote:
>> Hi,
>> so I need to get a new server. I'd like to have 14 SATA drives on 2 RAID 
>> raid adapters. The adapter should:
>> - be well supported by NetBSD-3.x/i386 (a backport of a current driver
>>   may be acceptable)
>> - be managable from NetBSD (no reboot to BIOS to get disks status,
>>   start a reconstruct, etc ...)
>> - have at last 128MB battery-backed cache (I'd prefer more, but I'm not sure
>>   this exists)
>> 
>> What would folks running such hardware recommend ?

Answered in painful detail off-list.


>> Also, does anyone know Areca sata controllers ? One reseller here mention
>> them but I didn't found any info on theses.

You'd have to port the CAM-based driver from FreeBSD-5.4 or newer.  (I
beleive Areca originally supplied a FreeBSD-4 driver in source form,
which might have portions more useful as a skeleton for a NetBSD
driver than a FreeBSD-5 or -6 driver: interrupt handling, etc).


>I'm using LSI MegaRAID SATA 150-4 on two systems.  One of my servers has 
>8 400GB SATA drives on two of these controllers in RAID-5 configuration. 
>I'm quite pleased with the controller.
>
>LSI has some newer devices for which support was very recently added to 
>CURRENT; I have no experience with them.

Can you email me a pointer? Whatever these changes are, they're not in
amr(4), and my (very quick) scan of source-changes from March 2006
didn't find them.