Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2006 11:37:32 -0800 (PST) From: Tenebrae <tenebrae_bsd@niceboots.com> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: SATA RAID: Adaptec 1420SA, Promise TX4300? Message-ID: <20060401110818.U54953@localhost>
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Hello out there in FreeBSD land (and I hope S=F8ren peeks in, too). I've been rather behind the times here and am finally getting around to building a replacement server for my absolutely ancient FreeBSD 4.7 system. It's starting to experience problems (like a couple random lock-ups/reboots) and I'm sure some of the hardware is finally failing. It's no wonder - the thing is running an ASUS P5A motherboard with hardware so obsolete I can hardly find replacement parts anymore and besides, it's on the other side of the North American continent from me. I'm interested in this "newfangled" serial ATA stuff I've been hearing about (heh) and thought I might try my hand at getting a RAID1 mirror going on for my home dirs. Sadly, I have no experience with RAID. I had initially planned on just setting up two identical drives and using one to periodically back up the data, but have been told RAID1 is a better way to do this. Now I need to figure out what type of controller card to get and was hoping for some input on affordable cards. I was looking at the Adaptec Serial ATA II RAID 1420SA and Promise FastTrak TX4300 4-port SATA RAID PCI adapters. I did find a note on the Promise card that it is now supported in Current. Is this something that might make its way into the 6.x-STABLE branch at some point? Also, I have heard that there is "bad blood" of some sort between Adaptec and FreeBSD. I am not interested in a flame war ensuing, but if there is limited to no support, I'd like to know so that I can avoid their cards. Hopefully those two cards give an idea of the price range and requirements of the cards I'm looking at: 4 ports for future expansion, around $150 US (or less), low profile PCI for a rack-mount case. Are either of these two cards supported in FreeBSD 6.x-STABLE? If it makes any difference, I plan to buy a pair of these drives for it: Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB Hard Drive 6V300F0, Serial ATA 3.0Gb/s, 7200 RPM, 16MB Cache. The server will be primarily an e-mail and web server for private use with some rather large files. There are only a handful of users, but it gets a bit busy at times when the DJs do an update. I hope to get this up and running in the next month. If I've missed something painfully obvious here, please feel free to educate me and/or point me to a URL. Thanks for any tips, =09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09-Tenebrae. --- The sending of any unsolicited email advertising messages to this domain may result in the imposition of civil liability against you in accordance with Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code Section 17538.45.
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