Adonics 4 socket Compactflash card

[ernie]

I was looking at one of these 4 slot compact flash PCI card.

http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/ad4cfprj.asp

The idea being to made it a mirrored boot device with FreeBSD on it that then mounts a ZFS array.

In the card specs it says it works with Windows and Linux, so I was wondering if anyone had tried one booting FreeBSD?

 

[JQuick]

I was curious about doing a similar thing in the near future.

I have not used this or a similar device but did do a bit of searching.

I found that the documentation for that PCI card on addonics website refers to the Silicon image 0680 chipset and Medley.

The ata(4) driver lists silicon image 0680 as supported.
The ataraid(4) driver also includes read support for Silicon Image Medley metadata. This means you could probably use the provided configuration CD to configure raid set and lay down metadata and the ataraid diver to implement that raid support.

Since this ataraid driver would be using the host CPU to provide the actual raid support, I suspect that there would be little difference in performance to doing a GEOM based mirror on top of JBOD.

My own preference would be to use GEOM for this type of thing. By using the medley metadata and ataraid you might be limited to using their products to access the data in the future. Using GEOM you could easily use any old ATA or ASATA to CF adapter to rescue data or perform diagnostics if you have a problem in the future. Even if the metadata is a trivial issue, there are far more users of GEOM than ataraid medley so support with any problems in the future might be easier that way.