Scott Stanley wrote:
I'd like to use some of my big sata drives on my g4. Looking at the
various acrchitecture support pages, i386 is the only one that has an
explicit listing of pci sata controllers, so I initially concluded
that none were supported on macppc. Then I read the following at faq:
Almost all on-board SATA or IDE "RAID" controllers are this
software-based style, and will typically work fine as a SATA or IDE
controller using the standard IDE driver (pciide(4)), but are not
going to work as a hardware RAID system on OpenBSD.
(http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#RAID)
So I bought an Areca ARC-1120 card, not as a raid controller but just
to utilize my sata drives.
I see it recognized at boot (arc0), but I guess I was expecting to see
pciide0, wd1, or sd0.
I've gone round and round the manpages (sili, arc, bio, softraid,
pciide) and the faq trying to figure things out, but I'm not getting
it.
Could someone kindly show me the obvious thing I'm not getting?
Thanks in advance!
-Scott
The details should be 'there' in dmesg, but so long as the Areca has been
reported by the OS, the 'topmost' hardware layer should be in communication, and
the layers below it should 'JFDTRT' - already coded by other wizards.
That said - the Areca and others being 'intelligent' controller's, you must ALSO
enter ITS OWN BIOS and tell it how you want it to behave.
Even if only one drive is attached, the Areca has to be told what to do with it,
and what 'public face' to present to the OS for it.
There should be a message from the Areca showing right after POST, prior to
seeking to load an OS. Perform the key-magic to enter that and things should
become clear.
Only AFTER you have given the Areca the lie you want it to tell will that lie
become visible to the OS.
It won't be the actual HDD, 'coz the Os now works to the Areca, not directly to
the device.
Or pool of devices.
Not uncommon to have an 9-drive RAID array including local and global spares
appear to the OS as a single device. And it might be one of several such.
A decent controller earns its crust, manages spare swap-in, rebuild of spare or
hot-swapped devices, 'patrol' of its devices, and all that - w/o troubling the
OS. 'Most of the time' one can migrate the controller and its array(s) to
another OS, even another CPU arch near-as-dammit transparently, so even w/o
RAID, they are a good investment when you have a lot of data.
FWIW, historically those based on LSi chipsets, and more recently Areca, are
generally among the most cross OS/architecture portable and least problematic of
such controllers.
HTH,
Bill Hacker
