hardware for home use large storage

[Boris Kochergin]

Peter C. Lai wrote:
> On 2010-02-09 06:37:47AM -0500, Dan Langille wrote:
>   
>> Charles Sprickman wrote:
>>     
>>> On Mon, 8 Feb 2010, Dan Langille wrote:
>>> Also, it seems like
>>> people who use zfs (or gmirror + gstripe) generally end up buying pricey 
>>> hardware raid cards for compatibility reasons.  There seem to be no decent 
>>> add-on SATA cards that play nice with FreeBSD other than that weird 
>>> supermicro card that has to be physically hacked about to fit.
>>>       
>
> Mostly only because certain cards have issues w/shoddy JBOD implementation. 
> Some cards (most notably ones like Adaptec 2610A which was rebranded by 
> Dell as the "CERC SATA 1.5/6ch" back in the day) won't let you run the 
> drives in passthrough mode and seem to all want to stick their grubby 
> little RAID paws into your JBOD setup (i.e. the only way to have minimal
> participation from the "hardware" RAID is to set each disk as its own 
> RAID-0/volume in the controller BIOS) which then cascades into issues with 
> SMART, AHCI, "triple caching"/write reordering, etc on the FreeBSD side (the 
> controller's own craptastic cache, ZFS vdev cache, vmm/app cache, oh my!). 
> So *some* people go with something tried-and-true (basically bordering on 
> server-level cards that let you ditch any BIOS type of RAID config and 
> present the raw disk devices to the kernel)
As someone else has mentioned, recent SiL stuff works well. I have 
multiple http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132008 
cards servicing RAID-Z2 and GEOM_RAID3 arrays on 8.0-RELEASE and 
8.0-STABLE machines using both the old ata(4) driver and ATA_CAM. Don't 
let the RAID label scare you--that stuff is off by default and the 
controller just presents the disks to the operating system. Hot swap 
works. I haven't had the time to try the siis(4) driver for them, which 
would result in better performance.

-Boris