In message <20051202202439.GA11241@panix.com>,
Thor Lancelot Simon writes:

>You'd need a 9500 series card, and we don't have a driver for those at
>the moment. 

``Oh...''

>The FreeBSD driver treats them as SCSI host adapters, so
>porting it would not be trivial (Andy Doran, with minimal help from erh
>and I, ported the structurally similar 'mly' driver over a weekend a few
>years ago, but it was a _painful_ weekend for all involved) though it
>would certainly be possible.
>
>The 7500/8500 series 3ware cards are pretty cheezy, IMO.  The "R5 Fusion"
>is just a stripe cache, and indeed it's only large enough to cache one
>stripe at a time -- so they just give it to the first array you configure.
>Their error reporting is not very good and their performance is just so-so.

Isn't this is the family that was really hot about 5 years ago?  The
one where the Linux community raved about throughput of 100Mbyte/sec
writes and 300 Mbyte/sec reads? (i dont recall NetBSD numbers, sorry).

>You can boot from a RAIDframe RAID 0 mirror and keep most of your data on
>a RAIDframe RAID 5 set.  It's not an ideal solution but it should work.
>
>Another option but with less ports than you want would be the LSI MegaRAID.
>The newest ones at least have 8 ports (they're PCIe or PCI-X), have large,
>*battery backed* nonvolatile cache to speed up RAID 5, 

I thought those were all SCSI or SAS? I was looking for SATA.  (RAID:
Redundant Arrays of _Inexpensive_ Disks).  Hmm.  I see four-port and
six-port PCI-X cards. AFAICT it's only the SAS versions which are
PCI-e, and SAS fails the _Inexpensive_ part of RAID.

What I'm really looking for is high-density PCI-e SATA, which AFAIbC
oils down to Areca or Highpoint, which both have FreeBSD drivers, but
not NetBSD drivers. (I think both are FreeBSD CAM drivers.)