suggestions for SATA RAID cards

[Steven Hartland]

Willem Jan Withagen wrote:
> Steven Hartland wrote:
>> The Areca cards I can recommend. Highpoint 1820a is surprisingly good
>> for its price and the later cards have better performance still
>> apparently. N.B. Use the min stripe size when creating the array for
>> max performance with this card under FreeBSD.
> 
> I was more thinking along the lines of a HighPoint 2720, but perhaps
> a 1820 would also do fine. What device driver would one use with that.

I've had no direct experience with the newer cards I'm afraid so cant
comment. If you go for the 1820 it must be the 1820a which is hardware
raid vs the 1820 which is software.

> [Ahhh, 'man -k highpoint' is your friend]
> Now what I liked about the 3ware stuff was that there are tools to
> work the raid from within FreeBSD. So that would require the newers
> ones... 

All the tools for the 1820a work nicely under FreeBSD 6.1 :)

> But the hardware list is only showing the 2320 and 2322 with a
> rr232x(4) driver. Which sort of makes me wonder for all the other
> stuff and their drivers.

232x has native support but I've never heard of the 2720 not even
mentioned on their site 2220 perhaps? This has a driver for FreeBSD
also including an open source version.

> The motherboard has both PCI-X and PCI-E so that should not be a
> connector problem. Now which bus is faster: 64Bit PCI-X at 133 Mhz,
> or a PCI-E 16x? 

Not really the right question as most cards are only x1 PCI-E cards.
That said I dont know for sure but I suspect they have very similar
capabilites.
    
    Steve


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