Silicon Image SIL680 RAID Controller

From: Fred Jones (freddydynip_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 06/28/04 

Date: 27 Jun 2004 23:24:39 -0700

Does anyone here have experience installing PCI-based RAID controllers
(specifically, the Silicon Image SIL680a) and sufficient patience to
assist in getting one installed for use in a web server that I'm
trying to setup using FreeBSD 4.10?

Specifically, I have two initial questions:

1) How do I physically connect the 2 Western Digital 40gig IDE drives
(and a single IDE CD-RW) to the computer? That is, do I connect one of
the hard drives to the SIL680's Primary controller and the other to
the SIL680's Secondary controller (with the IDE CD-RW connected to the
motherboard's Primary IDE controller? Or, do both hard drives get
connected (as MASTER and SLAVE, respectively) to the SIL680's Primary
controller?

2) Is support for the SIL680 IDE RAID controller built into the 4.10
kernel, or do I need to enter special configuration commands during
the initial installation of FreeBSD? Or, do I need to compile a custom
kernel?

I have a good deal of hardware experience with PCs, but none
installing or configuring a RAID (though I DO have alot of experience
with lost data due to hard drive failures, so redundancy and data
integrity (RAID-0?) are important).

I think I should also mention that this is my first experience with
FreeBSD. But it's not as bad as it sounds (I dabbled with Slackware
some years ago prior to the 1.0 kernel and even wrote a couple of
early help guides on how to install Linux on laptops) and I have no
programming experience. However, having said that, I can follow simple
instructions as long as they don't include too many technical terms
that aren't self-evident. I have a number of *NIX books (e.g., "The
Complete FreeBSD", "Red Hat Linux 9 Bible", "UNIX Made Easy", etc.),
but, strangely, neither the SIL680's "manual" nor any of these
otherwise books concise books provide answers to these seemingly basic
questions.

I apologize for the lengthy diatribe and if it's easier, feel free to
email me directly: freddydynip@yahoo.com.
Thank you in advance.

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