This tutorial is for FreeBSD 8. If you are looking for the driver for FreeBSD 9, you can forget about it. According to HighPoint, there are no plans to update the RocketRaid 26XX driver to FreeBSD 9. Since it is a binary driver, there are very limited things we can do. FYI, here is the reply from their support team:

New Priority: Medium

Status: Active -> Awaiting Customer Action

Dear customer there are no plans to update the RocketRAID driver to support FreeBSD 9.0.

Note: Our RocketRAID 27xx series controllers have native support in FreeBSD 9.0.

Regards

HighPoint Support Team

I will never purchase any product from this HighPoint.

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Recently I decide to upgrade my file server. I decide to get a PCI-Express SATA controller, and attach my hard-drives to it. After researching some cards, I finally decide to buy this one:

HighPoint RocketRAID 2640X4SGL

What it differentiates with other similar cards is the number of PCI-express channel. It comes with 4 channels while the other cards only carry one. In the other words, it will make transfer speed higher.

Anyway, long story short. FreeBSD does not recognize this card by default. You need to install a driver to support it. Unfortunately, the driver is version specific, and the driver on the web only supports up to FreeBSD 7. I have two choices – Switch to the legacy Microsoft Windows / Linux, or downgrade to FreeBSD 7.0. One way or the other, I need to say Goodbye to ZFS.

After some searches and hacks, finally I found the hidden driver. Here you are: Driver For FreeBSD 8.X

1. Extract the driver

tar -zxvf rr26xx-bsd-8.0-v1.2.tgz

2. Copy the driver (64-bit)

cp rr26xx-8.0-amd64.ko /boot/kernel/rr26xx.ko

3. Add the following in /boot/defaults/loader.conf

rr26xx_load="YES"

4. Reboot

reboot

4. After the reboot is done, you can see the hard-drives (/dev/da*) by running the following commands:

dmesg | grep da

That’s it! Have fun.

–Derrick