new server motherboard with SATA II

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 05:45:49PM +1000, Danny Carroll wrote:
> Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
>> No, it should not happen at idle.  You said "interrupt usage across 5
>> disks", which I read to mean "interrupt usage is very high during I/O
>> across a zpool consisting of 5 disks".  I misunderstood.
>>
>> IRQ sharing could result in what you see, but it sounds more like some
>> weird interrupt routing/bug that might be specific to that Asus board.
>
> That's kinda what I fear might be the case.
>
>> The FreeBSD Handbook has a list of hardware.  Anything that has its own
>> xxx(4) driver (e.g. twa(4), twe(4), arcmsr(4), etc.) will suffice.  Many
>> of these cards handle SATA disks which appear as daX in FreeBSD, since
>> they act as SCSI controllers.  SCSI CAM on FreeBSD is quite reliable.
>>
>> Currently, the best SATA controllers I've seen that have native FreeBSD
>> support (meaning the vendor supports FreeBSD) are Areca controllers.  I
>> have no experience with them due to their cost, but they are *very*
>> fast.
>
> Ouch....   Are the any other options?
> I'd be happy with a card that simply exposed the drive to FreeBSD rather  
> than implemented Raid.  Although I won't rule hardware raid out either  
> (given a product that was fast enough).

In that case, Promise cards are probably your best bet.  They'll use the
ata(4) driver, and disks will show up as adX, and they're inexpensive.
Plus, the FreeBSD ATA author (sos@) has significant documentation on
them, so they're fairly well supported.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |