[Beowulf] Supermicro H8SSL-R10 versus H8SSL-i motherboards, Broadcom SATA chips

[Bruce Allen]

Supermicro makes a couple of single processor dual core Opteron 
motherboards based on the Serverworks/Broadcom HT1000 chipset:

http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Opteron/HT1000/H8SSL-i.cfm
http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Opteron/HT1000/H8SSL-R10.cfm

As far as I can tell, the ONLY difference between these motherboards is 
that the H8SSL-i does not support the Broadcom Xelcore Raid 0/1.  The 
second system supports RAID 0/1.  But I'm not quite sure what this 
actually means!

If we run the Linux command 'lspci' on a H8SSL-i, it reports the following 
SATA chip:
   01:0e.0 RAID bus controller: Broadcom (formerly ServerWorks): Unknown
   device 024a.
The Linux PCI database describes this as a "BCM5785 (HT1000) SATA Native 
SATA Mode."

Has anyone on the list seen or used a Supermicro H8SSL-R10 motherboard? 
I have been unable to get one. If you have access to it, could you please 
run 'lspci' on it.  Does it report Broadcom device 0241 (RAIDCore RC4000)?

My impression is that on the systems we are building (which will at most 
have two drives) we can use standard Linux software RAID to mirror the two 
drives with the BCM5785, so we don't need the RAIDCore RC4000 support. 
Does anyone konw what advantages (if any) that might offer?

Cheers,
 	Bruce