Dan Langille wrote:
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. ;)
If you want to go this route, I bought one a while ago so that I could
stuff as many dual-port Gigabit Ethernet controllers into it as possible
(it was a SPAN port replicator):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130136. Newegg
doesn't carry it anymore, but if you can find it elsewhere, I can vouch
for its stability:
# uptime
1:20PM up 494 days, 5:23, 1 user, load averages: 0.05, 0.07, 0.05
In my setups with those Silicon Image cards, though, they serve as
additional controllers, with the following onboard SATA controllers
being used to provide most of the ports:
SB600 (AMD/ATI)
SB700 (AMD/ATI)
ICH9 (Intel)
63XXESB2 (Intel)
I haven't had any problems with any of them.
-Boris
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