Recommendations for hardware RAID? no 3ware please !

[Adrian]

Hi,

We have ~15 FreeBSD servers using different hardware.

Most of the servers we have are using recent IDE 3ware controllers
(eg 7450) in a RAID 5 configuration.

I've always found these more trouble than they're worth.  Sometimes
the wrong drive degrades and so when I replace the drive and try and
rebuild the array it repeatedly fails.  I need to take the whole machine
offline and spend a long time sector-scanning each drive  (using
powermax - they're Maxtor drives) and generally discover there is a
hardware fault with one of the other drives.. If the drive with the actual
error cannot be repaired using a sector level tool, it's then impossible
to rebuild the array because the errors on the non-degraded drive keep
causing the rebuild to fail so I have to rebuild the whole machine on
a new array.

Anyway  -   I like the IBM X series and we have had good experience
with IBM's support...  Unfortunately FreeBSD doesn't seem to fully
support the Adaptec hostRAID technology yet -  It will recognise the
array in FreeBSD version 6  but if you pull a drive out the whole thing
dies (it is dangerous to half-support a RAID controller like this).

Can anyone recommend a vendor (Dell, HP etc) that will make my life
easier?  (no reboots,  good management tools and monitoring) - I'm a
bit over putting machines together myself to save a few dollars.

Thanks,
Adrian.