Support for SAS/SATA non-RAID adapters

[Steve Polyack]

Freddie Cash wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 11:43 PM, Rink Springer <rink at freebsd.org> wrote:
>   
>> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 08:38:21PM -0800, Freddie Cash wrote:
>>     
>>> I've also found a couple of Areca cards (PCI-X, non-RAID/PCIe RAID),
>>> and have heard good things about Areca support in FreeBSD.  Any
>>> comments on their quality/performance/reliability?
>>>       
>> I have got an Areca ARC-1110 4x SATA2 PCI-X card in my server, and I'm
>> quite impressed with the performance; these cards do very well in terms
>> I/O operations per second and the driver has been rock solid for me. The
>> only downside is that they are quite expensive (but well worth it, IMO)
>>     
>
> Compared to a 3Ware 9550SXU controller, these are cheap.  The Areca is
> only $500 (open-box) or $700 (new) on newegg.ca.  The 3Ware cards are
> over $1000, with the PCIe versions being over $1200 (which is what
> started me on this journey -- hardware budgets are getting smaller and
> smaller each year).
>
>   
We've also tried the Areca cards with FreeBSD - the Areca 
ARC-1680IX-12-2G PCIe x8 card to be precise.  It's a SAS/SATA RAID 
card.  The performance was very impressive.  MUCH better than the Dell 
PERC4/5/6s we were used to.  The drivers also seemed to be rock solid 
(FreeBSD is even listed as a supported OS on the company's website).  
The feature-set of the card itself is also very rich... The one we tried 
had its own OOB management via serial port or dedicated 100mbps ethernet 
jack.  It supports endless combinations of RAID arrays, volumes, and 
SMTP/SNMP alerts.