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PCI internal SATA cards?



There's a NetBSD/i386 machine at work (currently 4.0.1 - for those of
you on tech-kern, it's the one I've been doing RAIDframe hacking-about
on recently).  It's got a 3ware RAID card in it, twe0, which is being
used JBOD, as just a 12-port SATA interface.

If this card dies, we'll have problems.  It occurs to me that there
surely are PCI cards providing internal SATA connections, and that the
twe could in principle be replaced with a collection of such cards
providing a total of at least 12 SATA ports.  There are (at least) two
spare PCI slots, so, after removing the twe, we'd need only 4 ports per
card, which strikes me as plausible.  Might not need even 4 ports per
card, if my memory of spare slot count is low.

But it is by no means clear to me that I can expect "just any"
off-the-shelf SATA card to play nice with NetBSD.  So, recommendations,
for or against?  It'd be nice to get support for disks >2T (ie, if the
card<->host interface supported sector numbers over 2^32), since that's
a limitation the twe imposes that could bite us in the reasonably
foreseeable future, but that's not essential.

I'm not sure if the machine supports anything other than PCI.  I can
send a dmesg.boot file to anyone interested if that would help; I don't
see anything there I recognize as being non-PCI, but that doesn't mean
all that much.

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