suggestions for SATA RAID cards

[Willem Jan Withagen]

Steven Hartland wrote:
> The Areca cards I can recommend. Highpoint 1820a is surprisingly good
> for its price and the later cards have better performance still apparently.
> N.B. Use the min stripe size when creating the array for max performance
> with this card under FreeBSD.

I was more thinking along the lines of a HighPoint 2720, but perhaps a 1820 
would also do fine. What device driver would one use with that.

[Ahhh, 'man -k highpoint' is your friend]
Now what I liked about the 3ware stuff was that there are tools to work the 
raid from within FreeBSD. So that would require the newers ones...

But the hardware list is only showing the 2320 and 2322 with a rr232x(4) 
driver. Which sort of makes me wonder for all the other stuff and their drivers.

The motherboard has both PCI-X and PCI-E so that should not be a connector 
problem. Now which bus is faster: 64Bit PCI-X at 133 Mhz, or a PCI-E 16x?

--WjW

> Willem Jan Withagen wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've ran into sort of a snag with building a 2T file server.
>> Given all the good press here for 3ware and the talk to the guys at
>> the CeBIT I decided to go for a 9550SX-LP8.
>> With that I bought a ASUS serverboard: K8N-LR with 165 dual core
>> opteron.
>> In itself is this a combo that I thing would do for a long time at my
>> home. ;)
>> However the 3ware controler decided not to play nice with 2 of the
>> PCI-X boards I have here. It gets stuck in the bios disc scan. I've
>> RMA-ed the card, but my guess is that it'll take a too long a time to
>> fix/replace it for my patience.
>>
>> So I'm looking for alternatives with good support under amd64. I've
>> seen that the Adaptecs are supported under aac(4). But what about
>> Promisse or Highpoint RAID controllers?