FreeBSD 6.0 as storage server with raid5?

[John-Mark Gurney]

Stijn Hoop wrote this message on Fri, Dec 09, 2005 at 10:30 +0100:
> Besides, I've seen a few hardware RAID controllers having issues
> themselves (and they weren't the cheapest ones available either).

Yep, and because of failure to get proper vender support, software
raid is looking more attractive to the company I work at...

Delaying upgrades of the OS due to hardware raid issues, and then
finding out that the ICP aka Adaptec no longer supports iir beyond
5.2-R (no 5.4-R or any 6.x and beyond) makes it harder for us to
justify spending money on hardware raid.  (who knows that the next
brand of hardware raid isn't going to have the another issue, and
decide to not provide support)...

At least they finally released a new patch against 5.4-R, but we can
barely get them to support us on 4.7-R (which has the same driver as
4.11-R), let alone when we had issues on 5.4-R...

So, even though software raid may not be as reliable among other things,
at least you have the source and can fix it, and don't have to wait many
months just to wait longer for the vendor to fix the issue...

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."