I'm looking to possibly use a SATA RAID card instead of softraid(4) on a new amd64 PCIx or PCI express machine build.
I'm tired of rebooting into the bios for other machines with mfi(4). So I want to build something manageable via bio(4), bioctl(4), and maybe sensorsd(8). That'll either be softraid, or some kind of supported SATA RAID card. However, most of the card models listed in the man pages for ami(4), ciss(4), ips(4), and arc(4) are older discontinued SCSI and PCI beasts. ami(4) also is limited to 2TB logical volumes. Given the whole "go dark and produce driver blobs only" trend in the RAID controller business, I'm not getting my hopes up too much for a hardware SATA RAID option, and will certainly be OK with softraid(4). However, if you have any ideas, I'd appreciate suggestions about manufacturers to look at for SATA RAID cards that might provide for drive status and maintenance commands via bio(4) and bioctl(4) in OpenBSD. Richard
