hardware for home use large storage

[Dan Langille]

Charles Sprickman wrote:
> On Mon, 8 Feb 2010, Dan Langille wrote:
> 
>> I'm thinking of 8x1TB (or larger) SATA drives.  I've found a case[2] 
>> with hot-swap bays[3], that seems interesting.  I haven't looked at 
>> power supplies, but given that number of drives, I expect something 
>> beefy with a decent reputation is called for.
> 
> For home use is the hot-swap option really needed?  

Is anything needed?

The option is cheap and convenient.  When it comes time to swap disks, 
you don't have to take the case apart, etc. Yes, it saves downtime, but 
it is also easier.

 > Also, it seems like
> people who use zfs (or gmirror + gstripe) generally end up buying pricey 
> hardware raid cards for compatibility reasons.  There seem to be no 
> decent add-on SATA cards that play nice with FreeBSD other than that 
> weird supermicro card that has to be physically hacked about to fit.

They use software RAID and hardware RAID at the same time?  I'm not sure 
what you mean by this.  Compatibility with FreeBSD?