Hardware RAID support? Which controller best to use?

[Olaf Greve]

Hi all,

Thanks a lot for the many replies; over the weekend I have been 
incommunicado, hence the late reply.

I have forwarded the relevant e-mails to the person who asked me for 
this inquiry, and I think he should have enough information in order to 
choose a good hardware set-up.

I'll try to get him to buy one of those 9500S-4 controllers, and then I 
can rest assured that I'll be able to set it up without too many 
surprises. ;)

Regarding the benchmarking: I'll try to see if I can run it on my live 
server, the only issue being of course that the results will be 
polluted, as I can't really take it off-line (or rather: I don't want 
to). If the test runs quickly I might temporarily kill Sendmail and 
Apache to eliminate the majority of the user load, and then run it...
I'll have a look-see when I have a bit more time. :)

Good: AFAIC, FreeBSD amd64 it is, with the 9500S-4 (in RAID-10 mode 
probably)! :)

Cheers!
Olafo

PS: I will probably reply off-list to some of the specific MySQL 
tuning/compilation questions...