raid backup

[Michael Vince]

Maksymilian Wrzesinski wrote:
> hello,
> 
> what would you recommend as good (and cheap) solution for backup raid?
> i need two 120gb hard disks connected in a proper mode to the
> controller to back up one another.
> 
> what chips on controllers are fast and reliable - and still being
> cheaplike silicon image ata controllers? are they supoorted by
> freebsd?
> 
> tia,
> 

I have been keeping my eye out for cheap hardware based RAID solutions 
my self all the addon cards still seem to be either cheap software 
based? stuff from taiwan or expensive and often slow addon cards that 
have questionable support for FreeBSD

It seems that the the Nforce3 250gb from Nvidia has hardware based raid 
built into their chipset for motherboards with a lot of top shelf 
features such as hotswap for SATA and both SATA and IDE RAID that can be 
combined
http://www.anandtech.com/chipsets/showdoc.html?i=2009
Quote from anandtech

'Other questions regarded Linux support on nForce3-250Gb. Nvidia 
emphasizes full support for Linux in their literature for nF3-250. We 
were assured that nF3-250 features will have drivers available for Linux 
if they are needed, and that all features will work in Linux. Linux 
users should be reassured to know that Linux was a significant part of 
the nVidia presentation - not a thrown-in afterthought as we often see 
when it comes to Linux.'

I am guessing this motherboard chipset would work well as RAID, it 
shouldn't matter what what OS you run as it is true hardware based RAID,
I am assuming with FreeBSD we would miss out of some utils to query the 
raid as to the status of the HDs but I would hope that FreeBSD would 
eventually get the same tools as that would be available for Linux

The performance should be good as well since they have the benchmarks 
are there and compare to the intel stuff if you have seen some of 
benchmarks of some of the 'high performance?' addon raid cards that 
anadtech have benchmarked over time you will be shocked to see how slow 
and crappy some of them are!

The Nforce3 250gb is for AMD 64 CPUs only but they have also just 
released the same technology for the Athlon XP series called Nforce2 
Ultra 400gb which would make a very cheap and powerful solution.
http://www.anandtech.com/chipsets/showdoc.html?i=2051

The latest Intel chipsets don't seem to be to far behind as far as I can 
tell but they don't offer things like hot swap etc.
Still as I said I have just been watching out I am not sure how well 
this stuff would work on FreeBSD but I am thinking in theory it should 
be OK.
If any one really knows and has tested with them it would be great to 
hear about it.

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