RAID 5 Adapters and FreeBSD 5.2.1 (was: Intel chipsets and FreeBSD)

[adam at otterycomputers.com]

Hmm well the cheepest 3ware RAID 5 SATA card is about £240 which is like £100
more than my budget would strecth too, shame those 3ware cards look real nice.
Also I think they are 64bit pci, i only have 32bit pci :-(

Im guessing that mmy best bet then is to get some sort of supported SATA
controller and then to use Vinum on top to do the RAID stuff. Can anyone make a
well supported but under £140 recommendation.

Shame coz those promise ones look wicked and fit my budget.
Can anyone tell me how difficult it would be to develop a driver for the promise
card, I have experience of C and C++ amongst others and am fairly knowledgable
about PC's and Hardware but have never had to look so low-level as writting a
driver.

Thanks Adam.


>  >
>  > Hey Guys,
>  >
>  > My aim is to have FreeBSD 5.2.1 running on my system with 3 x 80GB
> IDE Hard
>  > disks in a RAID 5 configuration.
>  > I want FreeBSD 5.x becuase my machine is a Multi-processor and I want
> to take
>  > advantage of the SMP code in 5.x.
>  >
>  > My question is this - whats the best way to acheive this?
>  >
>  > Should I use Vinum to acheive the Raid 5 bit, or whats this new Geom
> thingy,
>  > also I would prefer a RAID adapter card providing they are cheap enough
>  > (because the performance is better in hardware, isnt it?) ?
>  >
>  > Also what is the support for SATA like, Ideally I would like to have
> SATA Hard
>  > Disks. I had consulted the HCL for FreeBSD 5.2.1 but it seems
> incomplete as it
>  > doesnt list the Intel ICH5 SATA controller yet I know this works fine!
>  > Two products look interesting which could help me here, but i am
> unsure of the
>  > support for FreeBSD, could someone tell me whether either of these
> two products
>  > are suppored and if not recommend something that is -
>  >
>  > 1) Promise FastTrak S150 SX4.
>  >
>  > 2) Promise FastTrak SX4000 Lite.
>  >
>  >
>  > Thanks Adam Retter
>
> Patrick Hurrelmann wrote:
>
>   Hi,
>   actually there is no raid 5 support for Promise (ATA-Controller in
>   general) in 5.x. I don'T know much about Vinum, but you may use Vinum
>   Raid5.
>   Another solution would be a 3Ware SATA Raid-Controller using twe-driver.
>
>   Patrick
>
>
> Sorry, I replied wrong message ;)
>




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