From: Mark Weaver mdw1982@mdw1982.com
Hi all, I was wondering if anyone has tried and succeeded to use this controller. Its the bc4852 SATA controller. There's supposed to be support for it, but so far we've not been able to get the driver to load during the install and thus we've got no "valid drive" on which to load the OS.
Last time I checked, but I could be wrong, Broadcom's RAIDCore solutions are FRAID. They are very, very high-end FRAID designs (PCI-X, 8 channel), with lots of software IP for rebuild options, etc..., but still FRAID. I've never personally tried the cards because they aren't any cheaper than 3Ware solutions. But they claim integration tools with Linux's LVM/MD (I have no idea how these work) and should have at least ATA/SATA channel drivers for just a bunch of disks (JBOD) as with any ATA/SATA controller.
Luckily Broadcom's new IC for either PCIe x4 or PCI-X 1.0 is an intelligent, MIPS-based hardware solution for either SATA or new Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). The pricing should be similar with the controller being under $60/1K quantity, but finally bring some serious performance to the table (along with up to 768MB of battery-backed DRAM).
-- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org