From owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Aug 5 01:55:12 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 965FE16A4DA for ; Sat, 5 Aug 2006 01:55:12 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd-hardware@m.gmane.org) Received: from ciao.gmane.org (main.gmane.org [80.91.229.2]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BE4B943D45 for ; Sat, 5 Aug 2006 01:55:11 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from freebsd-hardware@m.gmane.org) Received: from root by ciao.gmane.org with local (Exim 4.43) id 1G9BNW-0004vH-Gi for freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org; Sat, 05 Aug 2006 03:55:03 +0200 Received: from brist2_dhcp-137.greenmountainaccess.net ([69.54.13.137]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Gmexim 0.1 (Debian)) id 1AlnuQ-0007hv-00 for ; Sat, 05 Aug 2006 03:55:02 +0200 Received: from scott by brist2_dhcp-137.greenmountainaccess.net with local (Gmexim 0.1 (Debian)) id 1AlnuQ-0007hv-00 for ; Sat, 05 Aug 2006 03:55:02 +0200 X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org From: "Scott I. Remick" Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2006 21:45:54 -0400 Lines: 18 Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org X-Gmane-NNTP-Posting-Host: brist2_dhcp-137.greenmountainaccess.net User-Agent: Pan/0.14.2.91 (As She Crawled Across the Table) X-Archive: encrypt Sender: news Subject: Current state of motherboard RAID support? X-BeenThere: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: General discussion of FreeBSD hardware List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 05 Aug 2006 01:55:12 -0000 Hello... I'm starting to look at building a new FreeBSD box to replace my one at home. I'd be running AMD as i386 (as opposed to AMD64, due to things like the nVidia video driver and Flash). My target is to have 2 mirrored pairs of SATA drives. Many motherboards have built-in hardware RAID these days that can do mirroring. One of the ones I'm looking at is the Asus M2N-E which uses the nForce 570 chipset and has 6 onboard SATA ports. I am trying to determine the current state of things regarding FreeBSD's support of this though. I initially thought that as long as it was hardware RAID, the hardware does the work and makes it look to the OS like just a single drive but from my reading that appears to not be the case...? A lot of what I found was pretty dated though. Some of it also had to do with nForce RAID not choosing the proper drive to recover from in the event a drive goes bad. Have these issues been resolved? Is it possible to depend on on-board nForce RAID now? Or do I need to shell out big-bucks for a 3Ware card? Is there something cheaper than 3Ware that's 100% supported in FreeBSD? Thanks