From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Jun 24 22:51:41 2011 Return-Path: Delivered-To: questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (unknown [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3C54C1065674 for ; Fri, 24 Jun 2011 22:51:41 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from feenberg@nber.org) Received: from mail2.nber.org (mail2.nber.org [66.251.72.79]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F07538FC15 for ; Fri, 24 Jun 2011 22:51:40 +0000 (UTC) Received: from nber7.nber.org (nber7.nber.org [66.251.72.41]) by mail2.nber.org (8.14.4/8.14.4) with ESMTP id p5OMpbI5091311 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NOT); Fri, 24 Jun 2011 18:51:38 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from feenberg@nber.org) Received: from localhost (feenberg@localhost) by nber7.nber.org (8.14.4/8.14.4/Submit) with ESMTP id p5OMpbmw032626; Fri, 24 Jun 2011 18:51:37 -0400 X-Authentication-Warning: nber7.nber.org: feenberg owned process doing -bs Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2011 18:51:37 -0400 (EDT) From: Daniel Feenberg To: questions@freebsd.org Message-ID: User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (LFD 1167 2008-08-23) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed X-Anti-Virus: Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Linux Mail Server 5.6.39/RELEASE, bases: 20110625 #5633758, check: 20110624 clean Cc: Subject: SAS controller for FreeBSD X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2011 22:51:41 -0000 We have been using ZFS under FreeBSD for a while, and are very pleased, but are considering building a system with SAS drives, in the hope that they will be faster (any truth to that?). I am assuming that I should look for a non-RAID controller, but I can't find any SAS controllers that don't claim to do RAID and are on the FreeBSD compatibility list. I have always thought that using a RAID controller for a non-raid partition was a bad idea, since it limited ones ability to swap controllersm, and presumably if we are using ZFS for our RAID we don't need another level of RAID provided by the controller. Is that prejudice justified? There are some SAS RAID controllers that claim to support FreeBSD but I can't tell if their JBOD mode is a true pass-through, or leaves some undesirable junk on the disk. So does anyone have a recomendation for a reasonably priced SAS controller? We aren't looking for anything fancy at this point. Daniel Feenberg NBER