Dell hardware raid 0 (sas5ir) or gmirror?

[Doug Ambrisko]

Joe Koberg writes:
| Josef Karthauser wrote:
| > On Mon, Jan 15, 2007 at 11:21:06AM +0000, Josef Karthauser wrote:
| >> I'm purchasing a new server, and was wondering what anyone thought 
| >> about whether to pay extra for the SAS5IR card so I can RAID0 the 
| >> two drives, or whether to just rely on gmirror. My worry about the 
| >> former is that I can't seem to find management tools for 
| >> controlling the hardware controller. What if one of the drives 
| >> fails? How would I know?
| > 
| > Of course I mean RAID1!
| 
| I just bought two Dell PE-1950's to use as routers. They have LSI Logic 
| PERC/5i's attached to 80GB SATA drives.  I am pretty sure this is the 
| same card used for SAS.
| 
| One thing is for sure, the mfi(4) card and driver aren't shy!  See below 
| for examples of the kernel messages I get regularly.  I am sure drive 
| failure would be well noted.

FYI, you can silence it to your level of comfort via:
	hw.mfi.event_class
in /boot/loader.conf.  The values being:
        MFI_EVT_CLASS_DEBUG =           -2,
        MFI_EVT_CLASS_PROGRESS =        -1,
        MFI_EVT_CLASS_INFO =            0,
        MFI_EVT_CLASS_WARNING =         1,
        MFI_EVT_CLASS_CRITICAL =        2,
        MFI_EVT_CLASS_FATAL =           3,
        MFI_EVT_CLASS_DEAD =            4
The new default is info. so it's a little quieter.  I'd suggest some
care in going over info since a drive that failed will come through but
when it is now okay will not.  So if you are waiting for that you
won't know.  Here, we like the debug and progress stuff put into 
/var/log/messages.  It makes support a lot easier.

Doug A.