[BUGS] SATA and old BIOSes

[Bernie Maier]

I was wondering whether if I got a SATA RAID PCI card to put into my old
FreeBSD box, would I run into any problems with BIOS HDD size limitations
or whether FreeBSD and/or the modern SATA card would just bypass the
BIOS.  (The HighPoint RocketRAID 1542 for example claims to have FreeBSD
support <http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/rr1542.htm>.)

I foolishly tried to buy a bring-you-own-disks NAS box (the QNAP TS-209Pro)
along with two 1TB SATA disks (on QNAP's supported list, mind you).  Turns
out that there's no end of problems with this current batch of QNAP boxes,
and despite all the hacky suggestions from their support, I can't get the
thing up and running.  So I'm going to return it, but now have two large
SATA disks with nothing to use them in (no other SATA gear at home).  So I
need to decide whether to return the HDDs as well (and suffer a "restocking"
fee) or compound my current misery by buying yet another piece of gear to
try them in.  Of course, I have no way of telling yet whether either disk
is faulty itself.

Cheers,

    Bernie