hardware for home use large storage

[Dan Langille]

Boris Kochergin wrote:
> Peter C. Lai wrote:
>> On 2010-02-09 06:37:47AM -0500, Dan Langille wrote:
>>  
>>> Charles Sprickman wrote:
>>>    
>>>> On Mon, 8 Feb 2010, Dan Langille wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>>>       
>>
>> Mostly only because certain cards have issues w/shoddy JBOD 
>> implementation. Some cards (most notably ones like Adaptec 2610A which 
>> was rebranded by Dell as the "CERC SATA 1.5/6ch" back in the day) 
>> won't let you run the drives in passthrough mode and seem to all want 
>> to stick their grubby little RAID paws into your JBOD setup (i.e. the 
>> only way to have minimal
>> participation from the "hardware" RAID is to set each disk as its own 
>> RAID-0/volume in the controller BIOS) which then cascades into issues 
>> with SMART, AHCI, "triple caching"/write reordering, etc on the 
>> FreeBSD side (the controller's own craptastic cache, ZFS vdev cache, 
>> vmm/app cache, oh my!). So *some* people go with something 
>> tried-and-true (basically bordering on server-level cards that let you 
>> ditch any BIOS type of RAID config and present the raw disk devices to 
>> the kernel)
> As someone else has mentioned, recent SiL stuff works well. I have 
> multiple http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132008 
> cards servicing RAID-Z2 and GEOM_RAID3 arrays on 8.0-RELEASE and 
> 8.0-STABLE machines using both the old ata(4) driver and ATA_CAM. Don't 
> let the RAID label scare you--that stuff is off by default and the 
> controller just presents the disks to the operating system. Hot swap 
> works. I haven't had the time to try the siis(4) driver for them, which 
> would result in better performance.

That's a really good price. :)

If needed, I could host all eight SATA drives for $160, much cheaper 
than any of the other RAID cards I've seen.

The issue then is finding a motherboard which has 4x PCI Express slots.  ;)