hardware for home use large storage

[Peter C. Lai]

On 2010-02-09 07:52:05PM +0100, Andre Wensing wrote:
> 
> 
> Freddie Cash wrote:
>> 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.
>> 
> 
> And I thought I found one in the Adaptec 1405 Integrated SAS/SATA 
> controller, because it's marketed as an inexpensive SAS/SATA non-RAID 
> addon-card. On top of that, they advertise it as having FreeBSD6 and 
> FreeBSD7-support and drivers. So I ordered it for my storage-box (FreeNAS) 
> with great expectations. Sadly, they don't have support nor drivers for 
> FreeBSD ("drivers will be released Q4 2009") at all, so I'm thinking of 
> leaving FreeNAS and trying some linux-flavor that does support this card...
> But Adaptec doesn't have a great track-record for FreeBSD-support, does it?
> 

Everything is a repackage of some OEM these days (basically gone are the
days of Adaptec==LSI==mpt(4) and all). Find the actual chipset make and
 model if you can, then you can look at what is supported, as the drivers 
deal with the actual chipset and could care less about the brand of some
vertically-integrated fpga package.

Probably will want to give a shout-out on -hardware i.e.
http://markmail.org/message/b5imismi5s3iafc5#query:+page:1+mid:5htpj5fw7uijtzqp+state:results

-- 
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Peter C. Lai                 | Bard College at Simon's Rock
Systems Administrator        | 84 Alford Rd.
Information Technology Svcs. | Gt. Barrington, MA 01230 USA
peter AT simons-rock.edu     | (413) 528-7428
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