That's another good suggestion. Right now we don't know exactly how much stuff works in the O2 PCI slot. There's a lot that could be tried. :)
From what I'm seeing in the linux-mips list, there's still some roughedges in DMA support and a few things that might impact some drivers, but a lot of stuff will likely "just work".
-S- On Sat, 25 Aug 2007, Sunil Amitkumar Janki wrote:
Since you want cheap, high performance and flexible storage you could also consider buying a SATA or SAS controller. Then you can use either SATA or SAS disks with higher performance than you can get from either USB or Firewire. I have 3 SATA controllers in my old AMD Athlon server (a repurposed desktop) at the moment, but I will try one of those soon in my Sun E250 server to see if and how well it works (on Slackware 12.0 SPARC). Sunil