well-supported SATA RAID card?

[Freddie Cash]

On Fri, March 10, 2006 1:01 am, Brian Szymanski wrote:
> After not having much success with the hptmv driver for highpoint's
> rocketraid 1820A, I'm wondering if other folks have had good luck
> with any SATA RAID cards with at least 6 ports... Is there a SATA
> RAID card with utilities that let you manage while the OS is running
> that folks have had good luck with? I've been happy with the megaraid
> series on linux at my job, but I'm wondering if the management
> utilities are there on freebsd, etc.

We've had great successes with the 3Ware Escalade line of RAID
controllers.  The 3DM2 web-based management tools are amazing, and
I've heard good things about the CLI version.  We've got FreeBSD 5.3,
5.4, and 6.0 boxes (32-bit and 64-bit) running (or testing) the
7506-4LP (PATA), 9500S (SATA using bridge chips), and 9550SX (true
SATA).

Haven't run any speed benchmarks (we're more concerned with
reliability, rebuild speed, and management tools) but the performance
is a lot better than when we used LSI MegaRAID 150-6D cards (those
things are crap, especially the management "tools").

The 7000 and 8000-series Escalade cards use the twe(4) driver in
FreeBSD 4.11+, 9000 and 9500-series cards use the twa(4) driver in
FreeBSD 5.2+, and the 9550-series cards use the twa(4) driver in
FreeBSD 6.0+.

I've also heard good things about the Areca RAID controllers, although
we have not used any.

----
Freddie Cash
fcash at ocis.net