SATA: RAID 5 controller recommendations

[Michael VInce]

For SATA I have always been getting the Dell 750s (now 850s) which use 
the 'aac'
Adaptec AdvancedRAID Controller driver, do 'man aac' for more details.
Dell supply them with a 64meg cache and are hardware raid, I have always 
just installed FreeBSD on them and only 1 hard drive comes up as RAID 
should be.

I have only been ordering the machines in dual drive mirror 1 Raid, but 
you could get a PowerEdge Tower servers like the 830 which do raid 5, I 
never used one though.
Alternatively all the Dell SCSI RAID systems have 256megs cache which 
use the LSI Logic MegaRAID ( man amr )
Stay away from the ultra low end SC1425 systems they have some kind of 
software based raid.

The thing I have noticed is that if you compare other (often claiming to 
be much cheaper) servers from other companies they often really skimp on 
their hard drive subsystems with software based stuff claiming its RAID.

I used to be anti Dell and build my own U1 servers from case and up and 
had a keen interest in cheap RAID technologies but I gave up a little 
while ago.
I believe Dell are great value when you consider their RAID 
implementations and as long as you are happy with Intel chips.

Mike

Steven Hartland wrote:

> Anyone got any SATA RAID 5 controllers they can recommend
> 64Bit PCIX.
>
>    Steve
>
>
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