Serial ATA RAID Controllers (5.x)

[Charles Sprickman]

Hi,

I'm looking for some feedback on the following two SATA RAID controllers:

http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata8000.asp (4 port)
http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/proddetail.html?sess=no&language=English+US&prodkey=AAR-2410SA&cat=%2fTechnology%2fRAID%2fSerial+ATA+RAID

I'd love to hear from 5.x users with recent 8000-series controllers -- I'm
really leaning towards 5.x for this project as the release schedule
finally matches my build schedule.  Both cards look good on paper, and the
pricing is similar. I'm mainly concerned about stability in real-world
use.

I've seen a number of recent positive comments from those using the 3Ware
under 4.x, but as someone with an older Escalade (sorry dmesg doesn't
report the model number), I'm a bit leery.  Going to 4.10 caused the thing
to lock up under heavy disk load, apparently the vendor-provided driver is
worse than the old driver Mike Smith put together.

I used the "Ask 3ware" link on their site to see what the party line was
on FreeBSD and this is what I got back:

======
Charles, our support of FreeBSD is just as good as Windows and Linux
(which is great!). We have embedded support in the main kernel and an
open source driver that customers can compile to whichever kernel they
are using if needed. There is a precompiled driver for both 4.X and 5.X
versions on our website. We also have both an HTML based management
utility and CLI available. Yahoo is actually one of our customers and
helped promote the support for FreeBSD by 3ware. If you have any other
questions please let me know. Regards,

http://www.3ware.com/support/OS-Support.asp

David Graas
3ware Corporate Sales Manager
======

Thanks,

Charles