On Thu, 2006-06-15 at 11:40 -0400, Timothy Miller wrote: > Perhaps we could work out an arrangement where we design and build it, > but 3ware markets and sells it. I like cooperation. :)
3ware also bases their cards on FPGAs, atleast last I checked. Anyway, I'd like to suggest a different market.. I'm having troubles buying plain sata cards with more than 2 ports, almost always they are some kind of proprietary raid. Luckily Linux usually ignores the raid functionality since it really has none. Linux software raid is really good nowadays, but could use some extra handles in the sata controller in order to handle hotswap and such better than today. Also raid hardware is really hard to get right since it should _never_ make a mistake with your data when trying to recover from a lost drive in the bios menu. So, what about making a plain 4/8-port SAS controller. Yes, thats right.. Serial SCSI.. The best thing about it is you can connect SATA drives aswell since SATA is a subset of SAS. So, a simple open designed SAS controller with well-thought-out DMA support and the likes in order to maximize performance compared to any cheap asic. In addidion we could add some simple (optional) features to assist in raid setups. Such as: -configurable handling of failed drives -support for accelerated mirrored writes WITH good callbacks for when the data has been written to all disks successfully -I'd also enjoy support for advanced diagnostics, such as possibility to see ecc failure rate and similar for a specific disk I think SAS and non-raid is the way to go, and that there really is a market for it both in low-end and high-end systems. Lots of SAS info: http://www.lsilogic.com/technologies/industry_standards/sas.html -HK _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
