Recommendations for hardware RAID? no 3ware please !

[Mike Jakubik]

Adrian wrote:
> 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
>

[ ... ]

> 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.

I think that you would find that the 9xxx series of these cards perform 
very well. The old 7xxx models were not so great. As far as SATA goes, 
FreeBSD has the best support for the 3ware products. Your next best bet 
would be HighPoint and Areca, they too support FreeBSD.