Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 16:15:32 -0800 From: Darryl Okahata <darrylo@soco.agilent.com> To: Bruce Campbell <bruce@engmail.uwaterloo.ca> Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: seeking recommendation on ATA RAID controller Message-ID: <200301300015.QAA08793@mina.soco.agilent.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 29 Jan 2003 16:11:34 EST." <1043874694.3e384386371b7@www.nexusmail.uwaterloo.ca>
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> If anyone has particularly good or bad experience, I would like to
> hear about it. I have not bought the drives yet, but will need
> 4 drives of roughly 160 - 200GB, on each controller.
How important is the data? A big issue is, "What do you do if the
controller dies two years from now." Will replacements be available?
(Will you even care about the data then?) If you've got the money, you
can just buy spare RAID controllers.
Alternatively, since you're dealing with ATA drives and modest data
throughput requirements, you might want to consider software RAID
(vinum, in particular -- I assume you're talking about FreeBSD). It's
quite nice, and does not depend upon any particular controller (or even
a particular location on the IDE bus -- if you need to, you can move the
disks to another computer, without having to remember which drive was
connected where). If you need lots of IDE drives, you can simply add
just about any inexpensive IDE controller to your system (or more than
one).
The only real downside to vinum is that you can't use it on the
root filesystem (well, you can, but it's currently a bit kludgy).
--
Darryl Okahata
darrylo@soco.agilent.com
DISCLAIMER: this message is the author's personal opinion and does not
constitute the support, opinion, or policy of Agilent Technologies, or
of the little green men that have been following him all day.
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