Time for a new SATA raid server ...

[John Pettitt]

I'm about to consign my old cobbled together file server and it's
collection of FireWire drives to that place servers go to die.

I need to build a file server with up to 2 TB of capacity - most of this
storage will be near-line storage for video and photo archives and so
will not have high performance needs.  It will need to be highly reliable.

My current thought is to go with a 3ware based SATA raid solution using
300 or 400gb sata drives (7 x 400's with 6 in a raid 5 array with a hot
spare).

Questions:  does anybody on the list have such a box running in production?

Any issues I need to watch for?

Does anybody build these pre-configured?

What other raid controllers should I consider? (must have real FreeBSD
support)

John