[chulofiasco]

Just thought I'd put this out there as I'm searching for a potential Sata card for Octane, 5V PCI64 cards do exist, just waiting for one to appear locally.

Hope you don't consider this to be a thread hijack, just not sure where it best belongs.

I'm connecting a few dots here, this may also assist with other potential cards to try, especially LSI

Firstly this broadcom/LSI document mentions something call Fusion - binary compatibility across SCSI, Fibre channel and Sata
https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/12353452.

Looks to be that they're possibly writing a single unified driver across those three interface types, they are all essentially SCSI/FC derived, so it seems wholly sensible.

The fuel hardware aggregator would seem to support this - I don't have an IP35 system and the O2 need the Dallas battery, but it was on 6.5.22 anyway
https://gainos.org/~elf/sgi/nekonomicon/...046/1.html

Lots of LSI card supported for the Fuel.

Where this gets interesting is that the QLA2324 works in O2 and Octane - thanks Jan-Jaap for that discovery - that's what got me thinking.
Is that IP35 driver for LSI fibre channel working for O2 and Octane.

The objective is to find, possibly an LSI SAS1064 based card, running Sata drives which accommodates the O2 and Octane 5V PCI slot.

I'm waiting for potential candidates to come available locally - one is the LSI Ser523 - I cannot for the life of me find the specific PCI ID for that card, I am hoping that it's SAS1064 based.

Another is just called the LSI Megaraid - they're on ebay, listed as Sata 150 cards.
There's plenty of others, question becomes, if they have SAS1064 chips, can they be flashed to IT mode HBA's.

Even Sata 150 for an O2 or an Octane would be both a performance and storage capacity boost.

There's lots of moving parts, is the IP35 LSI driver "Fusion" encompassing other LSI SCSI and SAS cards?

If anyone can run strings on the LSI firmware or binary driver that may yield some helpful clues, not unlike patching PCI ID's to get firmware and drivers to recognise compatible cards.

The PCI ID's may already be in there to begin with.

I'm sorry to burst your bubble but you'll be waiting forever. There is already been an enormous amount of work on this topic and basically just because the drivers are in Irix and just because you could run that version of Irix on the system does not mean at all that you can install that hardware. Regardless of a standard PCI or PCIX bus being present. A lot of the later drivers were formulated to only run on those later processors on those later boards. Believe me you're not the first to try on this path, back in the days it was firewire support and even that is really odd on certain systems. For example I know people seem to have trouble getting it to run on octane versus O2 with the exact same firewire cards. At least last I heard, someone can please correct me if I'm wrong.

But unfortunately that's why the whole octane PCI shoebox was sort of an extra add-on. It only really worked for installing gigabit ethernet and extra SCSI and fiber channel controllers for SAN Arrays. There is also a second seat PCI card and called the duo that allowed a second person to use the system simultaneously as a two seat, multi seat system. You had to have either a dual graphics card or a graphics card with a dual head, the adding card gave you an ethernet and keyboard and mouse port. Otherwise that's about it outside of serial which is normally for controlling various times of video decks.

Also to be fair an O2 or potentially even an octane doesn't have the bus or processor speed to hope to get data that fast. There's a reason they never built a gigabit ethernet card for O2. It can't possibly handle it. It's similar with the other systems, they were evolutionary jumps.

We've made some firewire gains.  I've been using a CF reader on Octane with native IRIX drivers. 

It's fascinating.