SATA cards? RAID/Non RAID

[Ben Scott]

On 6/26/06, Drew Van Zandt <drew.vanzandt at gmail.com> wrote:
> I can refute that a bit from personal experience...

  My personal experience is with the Tigon 3 gig Ethernet controller
from Broadcom.  Their "bcm5700" driver was, apparently, crap.
Broadcom initially refused to release hardware specs, so the only
option was to reverse-engineer things.  That lead to problems with
lock-ups that turned out to be hardware bugs.  Broadcom started
getting such a rep for producing crap hardware that they finally owned
up to the bugs and provided a list of workarounds -- but it took over
a year, IIRC.  Meanwhile, people had servers that didn't work.

  I watched a lot of this unfold on the poweredge-linux mailing list.
Google for "tg3 bcm5700" for details.  Some choice references:

http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2003-February/006379.html

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0106.1/0454.html

  More recently, I know their wireless drivers are binary-only.  Some
blame the FCC, but other vendors have managed to ship something that
works, so I suspect it's really vendor laziness/cheapness.

  IME.  YMMV.  HAND.

-- Ben