most rock solid SATA Raid card for 5.4-RELEASE and 6.0-RELEASE

[Scott Long]

user wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> My system calls for reliability above all else, and one of the ingredients
> needed is a SATA raid card.
> 
> Past experience with AAC scsi raid cards (dell PERC) have all been very
> good, and I feel like the no-brainer choice would be the adaptec 2610SA.
> 
> However, I cannot tell whether this support is in aac or not in 5.4 .. is
> it, and if not, do I just need to manually add a tuple to aac_pci.c ?
> 
> Is there something more "de facto" - something more solid and supported on
> freebsd than the 2610SA ?
> 
> thanks.
> 

The 16-channel 2610SA is supported in FreeBSD 5.4, just under a slightly
mangled name (21610SA, IIRC.  I was apparently confused about the name
of this when I added it).

I'll also be updating the RELENG_5 code stream soon with the new aac
improvements that are in 6.0.  This will include the corrected name for
this card as well as IDs for many new cards.

As for general SATA RAID support in FreeBSD, it has gotten better in the
past year.  Adaptec has started putting engineering resources into the
aac driver and has also updated the aaccli tool.  The LSI Megaraid
driver (AMR) has gotten a lot of improvements from both the community
and from LSI.  They also have a FreeBSD management tool, but it's a bit
primitive.  Areca has come onto the scene with full FreeBSD driver and
application support.  The Highpoint RocketRAID series is also fairly
well supported.  And there is always the 3ware 9000 series.  I assume
that Promise SATA is also supported, but I don't know much about it.
So yeah, there are a bunch of options.  Email me in private if you want
my personal recommendations.

Scott