6.0 on Dell 1850 with PERC4e/DC RAID?

[Vivek Khera]

On Jan 5, 2006, at 5:41 PM, Scott Mitchell wrote:

> I may be getting a new Dell PE1850 soon, to replace our ancient CVS  
> server
> (still running 4-STABLE).  The new machine will ideally run 6.0 and  
> have a
> PERC4e/DC RAID card - the one with battery-backed cache.  This is  
> listed as

I have an 1850 with the buil-in PERC 4e/Si since all I needed was the  
RAID1 mirror of the internal drives.  It works extremely well, and  
the speed is quite good.

As for notices of when the drives go bad, under 4.x I've had disk  
failures with the amr driver (different PERC cards) and not gotten  
any such notices in the syslog that I recall.  I did find a program   
posted to one of the freebsd lists called 'amrstat' that I run  
nightly.  It produces this kind of output:

Drive 0:    68.24 GB, RAID1 <writeback,no-read-ahead,no-adaptative- 
io> optimal

If it says "degraded" it is time to fix a drive.   You just fire up  
the lsi megaraid tools and find out which drive it is.

If you go to the LSI download area, they have one file for FreeBSD,  
which is labeled the driver.  In that zip file is also the management  
software for freebsd.  You'll want that.  Personally, I like the  
"MEGAMGR" software which was released for freebsd 4.x and mimics the  
BIOS' interface in a terminal window.

The rebuild on LSI controllers is set to automatic on the dells as  
default.  It just works as expected.

Overall, I'm a big fan of the LSI cards and the amr driver...

Unfortunately for me, the latest equipment I just got only takes low- 
profile cards, and LSI doesn't offer a dual channel RAID card in low- 
profile configuration... so I need to look at adaptec.