HP Proliant SATA RAID Cards for FreeBSD?

[kama]

On Fri, 17 Feb 2006, nocturnal wrote:

> Hi
>
> I need to buy a server from a HP partner for a customer and we don't
> need hardware RAID but we would prefer it. We do need SATA because of
> budget restrictions. I'm new to hardware and i don't know much at all
> about SATA or SATA RAID. I've had only bad experience with SATA RAID
> cards using FreeBSD where disk writes timed out and made the system hang
> repeatedly.
>
> They offer mainly Proliant machines and i'm wondering which cards you
> guys have experience with working well on FreeBSD. We will be using
> 6.0-RELEASE for the operatingsystem. We could also accept software RAID
> if it comes to that, all we need to know is that it will work without
> problems and be stable for a production environment.
>
> If any of you feel kind enough to recommend a machine for me then the
> required specs are at least two cpu slots with one Intel Xeon processor
> of at least 2.0GHz. At least 512MB ram and at least 40GB disks in
> hardware raid of course. SCSI disks would be great if the price is right
> but SATA disks are recommended because of limited ammounts of resources.
> --

If your specifications of the machines are so low and disk io is not
critical. You probably just need to buy yourself a moderate DL380. And
fill it with disks. It have a decent integrated smart array card (SA6i)
and you can choose between 36GB to 300GB disks... You will probably get
2*146GB for the price of one extra array controller.

I've been using the DL380 with FreeBSD for aprox 5 years and are more than
pleased with the stability and performance. The integrated SA6i is faster
than the former cards.

If you still want SATA have a look at these:

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/sharedstorage/sacluster/msa20/

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/arraycontrollers/index.html

If you go with a msa20 and a 6402 card, you are good to go... I dont know
if the smart array sata controllers uses the ciss driver as the 6402 do.
But this setup will cost you more than just buying scsi disks.

/Bjorn