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All of these units are based on the broadcom "airforce" reference design. Instead of having to purchase a Linksys or ASUS I would actually prefer to just be able to purchase the reference design from broadcom or have some one like gumstix manufacture this reference design "specifically to support Linux hacking". Here is the link to broadcom site http://www.broadcom.com/products/Wireless-LAN/802. 11-Wireless-LAN-Solutions. So someone could partner with a group like OpenWRT and sell them. This should not be to hard to do with the current offerings of cm, like flextronics.

A PCIe card with about 8 ports that doesn't cost over $400-500.

I saw the press release about this:
http://www.broadcom.com/products/Enterprise-Small- Office/Storage-Solutions/BCM8603
but no cards with it yet.

Build a system based on the Broadcom RAIDCore BC4852 controller.
http://www.broadcom.com/products/Enterprise-Small- Office/Storage-Solutions

Tomshardware sucessfully ran 32 S-ATA drives in a single box in RAID5 mode (2x 16 drive array because of software limitations). With the current generation of 500GB drives that should yield you close to 15TB. Add several more boxes along with some clustering software.
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20041006/index .html

In a motherboard with 4x PCI-X slots you will get very good performance for your money. S-ATA drives may not be as reliable as SCSI, but they (along with the controllers) are cheap so you can always have a few spare around in case a drive died (you would with SCSI anyway). Linux drivers are available ofcourse.

I have heard that a lot of hardware is pretty bad and is mostly fixed with software hacks in the driver. Companies may be not want people to know how broken some of their products are.

I suspect something more cynical. The best explanation I have heard was that Microsoft will not include open source drivers thus not to get excluded in Microsoft OS chip set support the HAL remains closed source.

I have also heard that some chips allow you to increase power to levels above FCC approval but this sounds weak as 1) it can be inexpensively limited in the hardware and 2) the FCC doesn't ban selling transistors because we can exceed FCC limits with them.

And it would be easy also to have the HAL in some ROM on board where you just poke it with a country code in initialization.

The best support for open source drivers will come from more independent type companies in the orient. I stopped buying Broadcom products just because they don't help in getting open source drivers yet use open source on it's reference boards. Sort of hypocritical on their part.

Most controller manufacturers recommend exactly the opposite -- almost every controller I've ever used explicitly stated that best case was to use identical drives in the array.

Yes.

What I did was use 8 Seagate 7200 baracudas. But I specifically did not buy them all at once. I bought 3 drives from different vendors and different lots. Then setup a 3-disk RAID5 with the Raidcore BC4852 card. I then gradually built up from a 3-drive to an 8-drive RAID5 (using the special transform function that allows you to add a drive to an existing RAID). This way all the drives are from different lots and have different total run times on my array.

Now whenever I have a disk failure I should have enough time to replace the drive(under the 5 year warranty) quickly enough to avoid the likelyhood of having 2 drives fail while waiting for my 3-day fedex'ed replacement.

I see new embedded designs based on MIPS and I'm not sure that's just because "MIPS processors have become entrenched everywhere". The reason is more likely that MIPS can give enough performance with low power consumption at attractive price point.

As an example look at Linksys routers (plastic boxes with Linksys logo and Broadcom reference designs inside), they switched from ARM (earlier routers without WiFi) to MIPS:
http://www.broadcom.com/products/Wireless+LAN/802. 11+Wireless+LAN+Solutions
http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/LinksysWr t54g

Ive said it before and ill say it again! RAIDCORE!!!

Everyone seem to think that raidcore is not in the game, but i am telling you that it ROCKS.

The standard line is that it is software raid. This is not the case. You can boot and run dos off of a raidcore with no drivers. The only reason i say this is to underscore that there is no REQUIREMENT to do software raid with this board.

They DO have a driver which allows a software ASSIST to increase speed of the XOR calculation if you have the spare cycles.

The reason you want to go wtih radicore is that you can expand the array LIVE and without backing up your data. They do things that 3Ware WISHES they could do. Like live raid level migration, live expansion, card spanning, etc..

I have a system with one raidcore and 8 250 gig sata drives. It is in a Raid-5 level config, and runs GREAT! I had a bad drive and the controller did exactly what it was suposed to. Namely, it marked the drive bad, sent me an email, and kept on running fine. I pulled the bad drive (live i might add), put in a good one (still live), and it rebuilt all in the background with NO issues.

Say what you want about 3Ware, Adaptec, Promise and all the others, but NONE of them has the level of features that this card does.

Raidcore

I saw this after the fact, but maybe you check up on your messages. According to its website, Broadcom has Linux drivers. Whether they work, I have no clue, but am planning to try it out as I have a new laptop with a Broadcom chip.

From Broadcom's site:

Broadcom's new solutions provide the enhanced features, performance and software drivers required for the demanding enterprise WLAN market. The software has been extensively tested in system verification test labs at Broadcom and at customer sites. The BCM4306 and the BCM4309 incorporate hardware support for WEP and AES and system support for the leading security protocols, WPA, TKIP and 802.1x, and software can be upgraded to the forthcoming 802.11i security standard.

eth2: Broadcom BCM4306 Wireless 802.11b/g Controller 3.11.30.5 (Compiled in . at 17:23:17 on Feb 12 2003)

They COULD probably do it. Apparently, the hardware acceleration was in there all along.

Also see: Hardware specs

system type : Broadcom BCM947XX
processor : 0
cpu model : BCM3302 V0.7
BogoMIPS : 199.47
wait instruction : no
microsecond timers : yes
tlb_entries : 32
extra interrupt vector : no
hardware watchpoint : no
VCED exceptions : not available
VCEI exceptions : not available
dcache hits : 4244635258
dcache misses : 1973420029
icache hits : 4223296655
icache misses : 2970528380
instructions : 0

Okay. Or maybe you'd rather play with the reference board?

where are the dual-proc small form factor CPU-X(where X is anything -x86) mobo's these days?

Is Micro-ATX small enough? If you'd be happy with ATX, then why not play with a dual processor 64-bit MIPS system?

it sucks. nobody seems to be pushing the CPU envelope, cheaply any more... its all x86 hegemony

Oh, cheaply. Perhaps you should take a look at some products based on ARM chips.

There are a lot of interesting CPU architectures out there. The only reason not to be using one is the need to run Windows (and even then you can use IA64, although it's not cheap.)

The current IBM POWER4 and upcoming POWER5 chips are both dual-core chips. Here is a nice presentation(PDF format) about the POWER5; you can see in the die photos where there are two cores. There have also been rumors of a dual-core PowerPC based on it, but nothing concrete yet.

Broadcom (which bought SiByte) markets a dual-core, 1GHz 64-bit MIPS chip called the BCM1250 which has a lot of integrated networking goodies.

Finally, it bears pointing out that on the other side of Intel's severed corpus callosum, they're also working on a dual-core chip.

Broadcom will have Entry-level products based on the BCM4780 chipset, and can retail for $99 (without drives), and require no CD installation process.

Braodcom Press release Braodcom NASoC tech spec PDF

It will take standard 3.5" desktop Hard drive, have raid and encryption capability.

Asus kit only takes 2.5" notebook drive. Looks like Broadcom will have a large market share for the low cost NAS marekt in SOHO.

I predict the nonoca will adopt the name "Intel Xeon Championship Edition."

You laugh now, but it's already been done with Serverworks chipsets.

You know, a company called Serverworks (I think part of Broadcom now), had used "Champion" as their first Xeon chipset at 66MHz FSB, Champion II for 100MHz FSB, Champion III for the 133MHz chips, and Champion IV which is now renamed "Grand Champion" for the current 400 and 533 MHz FSB, with HE, LE, SL, HE-SL and WS sub variants. HE is a quad CPU chipset, the rest ar dual, I haven't looked to see what the other differences are.

See for yourself:

Broadcom Grand Champion chipsets & more

The bcm5700 driver comes from broadcoms site and isn't included in the default kernel. It's GPL'd though so hopefully will be soon. Works fine here although it's only used on a switched home LAN so probably isn't pushed too hard.

Yes that is true, though it has not been a secret.
The 802.11G product line of Belkin is based on the same Broadcom model which Linksys used. Talked over many times before, but somehow it takes a while before Belkin's sourcecode is released just as Linksys did...

Linksys 802.11g cards (and the new version of their 802.11b PCI card) don't work in linux. The chipset manufaturer, Broadcom, is holding back specifications on the card. If you want 802.11g in linux, the best solution is the D-Link card, or the Netgear one. Both use the Intersil Prism GT chipset. Intersil is very open about their design, and supports the development of open source drivers for Linux and other operating systems. Even if Broadcom were to open up, Intersil is more likely the company you would be wanting to give money to.

Still, drivers for the Broadcom chipset would be nice, so take a minute to sign the petition.

What I don't understand is why this page on Broadcom's site specifies that there are available embedded Linux drivers, yet they are nowhere to be found.

...were it a HomePNA or HomePlug interface.

Unfortunately, as I find myself continually whining, HomePNA is a bit strangled by Broadcom at the moment, and HomePlug will probably require a bulky-expensive transformer for quite a while, while suffering a few more security/privacy/stability issues.

This is pretty cool, but only useful for your fridge if you do have an RJ45 jack next to it. You could do it with a WAP per-device- but then, you might as well make it integrated 802.11 from the start, and suffer its security issues.

A product like SercoNet's PNA->Ethernet wallplate would certainly go a way toward solving the problem in existing construction, but they've never responded to my requests, and the 2001 date on their site suggests they might never have left the design phase?

And this FAQ says "the OneDriver software that ships with AirForce solutions uses the same driver for 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g, so that customers of our 802.11b solution will be able to upgrade to the newer high-speed standards without changing their PCâ(TM)s software image."

Mailing list discussions seem to indicate that there are developers willing to write drivers to support Broadcom chipsets, but Broadcom is not "forthcoming with specs."

If you can write MIPS assembly, you can run anything that you can fit into 64k on this card.

It's too bad they don't have a processor like this MIPS-based processor. 600MHz is pretty slow, even for MIPS.

Apparently the above processor is becomming popular for areas other than networking, its intended market.

-Aaron

Broadcom realeased this chip. It's the BCM1250. Check out the press release, they have a reference design and Linux is one of the choices for the OS (the only one that fully supports the hardware).

Although not the exact same chip, check the date on this press release. About a year earlier and less money.