Hardware RAID and FreeBSD.

[Edho P Arief]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 7:11 AM, Colin Mitchell
<crm at colinrmitchell.endoftheinternet.org> wrote:
> Anyways, I bought a new lower-end computer that I was hoping to replace
> both with.  It is a dirt-cheap dual-core AMD that I had built for
> $175US.  It came with a 500GB HDD, and I would like to get another one
> to put in it.  Now, I would like to set up as a mirrored RAID setup (I
> think). I don't really know much about RAID, but I want to have the same
> disk image on both hard drives (in case one fails), and possibly three
> if I buy another HDD in the future.  Is RAID 1 what I want?  I also want
> to do SVN on it for my PhD code, as well as back up my Wordpress,
> Coppermine, etc...
>
> Now, here is where the FreeBSD gurus can chime in.  I would like to get
> a hardware RAID card to tie it all together.  I am also looking for a
> cheap one, maybe $30-$60US, if this is even feasible.  Anyone have any
> suggestions?  Any successes?
>

As I'm in softraid camp, I suggest saving yourself from buying a raid
card (especially the cheap ones) and use gmirror instead.

> Also, I see a lot of talk on here bout ZFS.  Is this something I should
> try, instead of the standard UFS?
>

Only if you have lots of ram (4 GiB or more). Possible with less ram
but I believe it's not recommended.