Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2007 20:52:11 +0300 From: "Alexey Karagodov" <karagodov@gmail.com> To: "Clayton Milos" <clay@milos.co.za>, "Artem Kuchin" <matrix@itlegion.ru>, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd? Message-ID: <c7aff4ef0702080952i7abb4a4dpe15e2554019b815f@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20070208165224.GA35610@icarus.home.lan> References: <00ad01c74b65$79db1710$0c00a8c0@Artem> <20070208094620.GA9599@rink.nu> <00a701c74b6e$7c3e4550$fe03a8c0@claylaptop> <20070208165224.GA35610@icarus.home.lan>
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http://www.3ware.com/ 2007/2/8, Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@freebsd.org>: > > On Thu, Feb 08, 2007 at 12:47:10PM +0200, Clayton Milos wrote: > > I can highly recommend the Areca family of SATA-II controllers. I have a > > ARC-1110 (4 poort RAID controller) with 4x 320GB Western Digital > > SATA-II drives attached to it in a RAID5 configuration. > > I have questions: > > 1) Do these controllers, from a BIOS level, permit SMART commands > to be sent directly to the drives (via pass(4)) so you can > monitor drives for potential upcoming failures and perform > drive tests, via smartctl? > > 2) Regardless of performance, have you actually tried a hard failure > with these controllers and seen what both the controller and the > OS do? A good example is to pull the SATA power plug out of one > of the drives in the array while it's powered on and see what > happens, both from a controller perspective and what FreeBSD does. > The same question applies to hot-swapping. > > 3) Does Areca provide any form of carriage/enclosure medium, such as > an enclosure which supports 4 drives, allows hot-swapping, and > allows you to query the enclosure for statistics (fan RPM, thermals, > and so on)? > > 4) string'ing the cli32 binary returns some references to SMART, but > the monitoring is generally retarded (literally, not slang) -- it > looks as if it just wants to use SMART to say "drive bad" or "drive > good". This is not an effective use of SMART, and does nothing > for those wanting to monitor drives properly (read: temperature, > excessive ECC, perform SMART tests for bad blocks, etc.). > > 5) Is there native FreeBSD 6.x binaries for administrative utilities? > It doesn't look like it, but maybe I'm looking at the wrong utility: > ~/V1.5_50930 $ file cli32 > cli32: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1, for FreeBSD > 4.2, statically linked, not stripped > > Many controllers (including Adaptec) these days suffer from some or > all of the above issues, too. Ultimately this turns me off to > using any form of RAID controller; vendors who refuse to give full > documentation for their hardware to engineers who want to write > drivers for it, refuse to implement proper passthrough methods (I'm > looking at you, Adaptec) so that you can talk to the drives directly > if need be, nor provide you with any form of useful FreeBSD support > ("here's our old crusty 3.x a.out binaries built by a guy who left > the company 7 years ago! Thanks for buying <company>, bye!") > > The best out of the bunch in this regards seems to be Promise, who > despite having "ehhh" controllers, has given Soren lots of documen- > tation and has been helpful in providing him answers to his > questions. I can't say the same for other controller vendors. > > I'm sorry if I sound bitter, but I must have gone through 4 different > brands of SATA RAID controllers before saying "screw this" and going > with non-RAID or using geom. I don't have anything against Areca > (I've never used their hardware), but I have no desire to use hardware > which does not support the above things -- which in 2007 should be > standard by all means. > > -- > | Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com | > | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | > | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | > | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB | > > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" >
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