hardware for home use large storage
Boris Kochergin
spawk at acm.poly.edu
Wed Feb 10 18:36:39 UTC 2010
Dan Langille wrote:
> Boris Kochergin wrote:
>> 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.
>
> That's a really good price. :)
>
> If needed, I could host all eight SATA drives for $160, much cheaper
> than any of the other RAID cards I've seen.
>
> The issue then is finding a motherboard which has 4x PCI Express
> slots. ;)
If you want to go this route, I bought one a while ago so that I could
stuff as many dual-port Gigabit Ethernet controllers into it as possible
(it was a SPAN port replicator):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130136. Newegg
doesn't carry it anymore, but if you can find it elsewhere, I can vouch
for its stability:
# uptime
1:20PM up 494 days, 5:23, 1 user, load averages: 0.05, 0.07, 0.05
In my setups with those Silicon Image cards, though, they serve as
additional controllers, with the following onboard SATA controllers
being used to provide most of the ports:
SB600 (AMD/ATI)
SB700 (AMD/ATI)
ICH9 (Intel)
63XXESB2 (Intel)
I haven't had any problems with any of them.
-Boris
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