Re: PCI internal SATA cards?

[Giles Lean <giles.lean%pobox.com@localhost>]

der Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost> wrote:

> 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.

One option that should work if you can still buy them are the four port
versions of the Silicon Image cards.  Here is dmesg excerpt from a
NetBSD-4.0/i386 system with a two port card:

satalink0 at pci1 dev 9 function 0
satalink0: Silicon Image SATALink 3512 (rev. 0x01)
satalink0: SATALink BA5 register space disabled
satalink0: bus-master DMA support present
satalink0: primary channel wired to native-PCI mode
satalink0: using irq 9 for native-PCI interrupt
atabus0 at satalink0 channel 0
satalink0: secondary channel wired to native-PCI mode
atabus1 at satalink0 channel 1
satalink0: port 0: device present, speed: 1.5Gb/s
wd0 at atabus0 drive 0satalink0: port 1: device present, speed: 1.5Gb/s
wd0(satalink0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 6 (Ultra/133) (using DMA)
wd1(satalink0:1:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 6 (Ultra/133) (using DMA)

Caveats:

o the four port cards were rare, and are probably rarer now
o the last two port card I bought was clearly old stock and DOA :-(
o some of these cards have an "external" SATA port (which takes away an
  internal port) *and* that socket is likely to be a regular SATA
  socket, not a proper eSATA one
o yeah, 1.5Gb/s ... not that anything's going to get to that
  speed in a Pentium III system I'm using mine in!
o I've no idea about 2TB support: I run a couple of 500GB disks

You could also look at the cards supported by viaide(4), but:

o I don't know if there are or were any four SATA port versions
o I tried one (don't recall the model number) and it appeared to trigger
  a kernel panic during autoconfiguation, but the system hardware was
  suspect and I moved disks around and then didn't need the card, so
  never did nail down what the problem was

My 2c would be to look at a contingency plan to replace the machine if
the 3ware card breaks, but that's in ignorance of what local politics
you face for repair v. replace, what else is in the box, etc.

Regards,

Giles