hardware for home use large storage

[Dan Langille]

Boris Kochergin wrote:
> 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:

I don't know what the above means.

I think it means you are primarily using the onboard SATA contollers and 
have those Silicon Image cards providing additional ports where required.

> 
> SB600 (AMD/ATI)
> SB700 (AMD/ATI)
> ICH9 (Intel)
> 63XXESB2 (Intel)

These are the chipsets on that motherboard?

> 
> I haven't had any problems with any of them.
> 
> -Boris