hardware for home use large storage

[Freddie Cash]

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 3:37 AM, Dan Langille <dan at langille.org> 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.
>>
>
> They use software RAID and hardware RAID at the same time?  I'm not sure
> what you mean by this.  Compatibility with FreeBSD?
>
> Add-on (PCI-X/PCIe) RAID controllers tend to have solid drivers in FreeBSD.
  Add-on SATA controllers not so much.  The RAID controllers also tend to
support more SATA features like NCQ, hot-swap, monitoring, etc.  They also
enable you to use the same hardware across OSes (FreeBSD, Linux, etc).

For example, we use 3Ware controllers in all our servers, as they have good,
solid support under FreeBSD and Linux.  On the Linux servers, we use
hardware RAID.  On the FreeBSD servers, we use them as SATA controllers
(Single Disk arrays, not JBOD).  Either way, the management is the same, the
drivers are the same, the support is the same.

It's hard to find good, non-RAID, SATA controllers with solid FreeBSD
support, and good throughput, with any kind of management/monitoring
features.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash at gmail.com