Date: Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:28:57 -0500 From: Dan Langille <dan@langille.org> To: Boris Kochergin <spawk@acm.poly.edu> Cc: "Peter C. Lai" <peter@simons-rock.edu>, Charles Sprickman <spork@bway.net>, FreeBSD Stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: hardware for home use large storage Message-ID: <4B723609.8010802@langille.org> In-Reply-To: <4B718EBB.6080709@acm.poly.edu> References: <4B6F9A8D.4050907@langille.org> <alpine.OSX.2.00.1002090103520.982@hotlap.local> <4B71490B.6030602@langille.org> <20100209161817.GI4648@cesium.hyperfine.info> <4B718EBB.6080709@acm.poly.edu>
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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. ;)
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