Date: Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:35:07 -0500 From: Boris Kochergin <spawk@acm.poly.edu> To: "Peter C. Lai" <peter@simons-rock.edu> Cc: Charles Sprickman <spork@bway.net>, FreeBSD Stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>, Dan Langille <dan@langille.org> Subject: Re: hardware for home use large storage Message-ID: <4B718EBB.6080709@acm.poly.edu> In-Reply-To: <20100209161817.GI4648@cesium.hyperfine.info> References: <4B6F9A8D.4050907@langille.org> <alpine.OSX.2.00.1002090103520.982@hotlap.local> <4B71490B.6030602@langille.org> <20100209161817.GI4648@cesium.hyperfine.info>
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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
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