Natively supported inexpensive RAID cards

[Gayn Winters]

> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of 
> Mike Loiterman
> Sent: Friday, February 03, 2006 11:57 PM
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Natively supported inexpensive RAID cards
> 
> 
> I'm looking to setup a 4 drive SATA RAID 5 file server for 
> mp3, avi, and
> other media using 6.0-RELEASE.
> 
> It appears that the supported SATA RAID cards listed in
> /stand/help/HARDWARE.TXT are all over $400.00.  That's hard 
> for to justify
> for this application, unless there are no other choices.  
> 
> I'd like to keep this simple, so if the price for that is 
> $450 bucks, well,
> I guess I'll have to deal with that.  But, I figured it 
> wouldn't hurt to ask
> if are there any well supported SATA RAID cards (meaning 
> setup automatically
> recognizes an array setup in the RAID card's BIOS as one 
> drive) in the $100
> to $200 range.  I don't need anything other than 5, but other 
> levels would
> be nice for future use.  Even better would be a motherboard 
> with onboard
> RAID that FreeBSD supported natively.
> 
> If there aren't any such cards or motherboards, are there 
> relatively easy
> work-arounds using less expensive cards?

Have you considered software RAID5?

-gayn

Bristol Systems Inc.
714/532-6776
www.bristolsystems.com