hardware for home use large storage
Boris Kochergin
spawk at acm.poly.edu
Wed Feb 10 19:11:46 UTC 2010
Dan Langille wrote:
> Boris Kochergin wrote:
>> 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:
>
> I don't know what the above means.
>
> I think it means you are primarily using the onboard SATA contollers
> and have those Silicon Image cards providing additional ports where
> required.
Correct.
>
>>
>> SB600 (AMD/ATI)
>> SB700 (AMD/ATI)
>> ICH9 (Intel)
>> 63XXESB2 (Intel)
>
> These are the chipsets on that motherboard?
Those are the SATA controller chipsets. Here are the corresponding
chipsets advertised on the motherboards, in north bridge/south bridge form:
SB600 SATA: AMD 770/AMD SB600
SB700 SATA: AMD SR5690/AMD SP5100
ICH9 SATA: Intel 3200/Intel ICH9
63XXESB2 SATA: Intel 5000X/Intel ESB2
-Boris
>
>>
>> I haven't had any problems with any of them.
>>
>> -Boris
>
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