hardware for home use large storage

[Boris Kochergin]

Dan Langille wrote:
> 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.  ;)
If you want to go this route, I bought one a while ago so that I could 
stuff as many dual-port Gigabit Ethernet controllers into it as possible 
(it was a SPAN port replicator): 
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130136. Newegg 
doesn't carry it anymore, but if you can find it elsewhere, I can vouch 
for its stability:

# uptime
1:20PM  up 494 days,  5:23, 1 user, load averages: 0.05, 0.07, 0.05

In my setups with those Silicon Image cards, though, they serve as 
additional controllers, with the following onboard SATA controllers 
being used to provide most of the ports:

SB600 (AMD/ATI)
SB700 (AMD/ATI)
ICH9 (Intel)
63XXESB2 (Intel)

I haven't had any problems with any of them.

-Boris