What is considered "the best supported" RAID controller for 5.x?

[John-Mark Gurney]

Patrick M. Hausen wrote this message on Sat, Jun 18, 2005 at 11:43 +0200:
> > The subject says it all ... I'm looking a new server, and right now have 
> > built it around the SRCZCRX PCI-X 128MB, since I've had good luck with the 
> > Intel RAID controllers with 4.x, and I *really* like the storcon CLI 
> > utility ... but, with the move to 5.x, I'm wondering if there is something 
> > else I should be looking at, or is this still a good card to go with?
> 
> IMHO it's the entire product line of ICP Vortex, now owned
> by Adaptec. These cards really rock. Battery backed up cache,
> RAID 1+0, driver maintained my company's engineers, yet in
> the stock FreeBSD kernel, curses based management utility
> to repair arrays without reboot, unattended rebuild if
> you exchange a broken disk with a brand new one, same
> interface to the host for _all_ products including SATA, ...
> 
> Just works. Period.
> 
> We use them for typo3.org, wetteronline.de uses them.
> 
> I'm in no way affiliated with them, I just like the products.
> A lot ;-)

We happen to be using them too, though we have had two hangs on 5.4-R
when using these cards (Intel's SRCU31A actually), though we are still
investigating the problem.  Basicly a process will hang in either ffsfsn
(fsync induces this write) or getblk (a read), and as far as I can
find out, the io just never returns even though the underlying block
device continues to work fine..

We didn't have any troubles under 4.x with the driver as long as you
had v1.10 of sys/dev/iir/iir.c integrated...  otherwise we had similar
hangs...

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

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