suggestions for SATA RAID cards

[Bob Willcox]

On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 12:02:47PM +0200, Willem Jan Withagen wrote:
> 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?

The x16 PCI-E has considerably faster theoretical speed than 133 PCI-X
(appx. 4GBs vs. 1GBs). However, the RAID controllers that I've seen are
at most x8 so they are only capable of transfer rates half that fast
(2GBs). Personally, I would go with PCI-E since in some performance
tests I did with Areca cards last year (both PCI-E and PCI-X) there
appeared to be a slight performance advantage to the PCI-E cards (sorry,
I don't recall any of the specifics anymore, so please take that for
what it's worth).

BTW, I've had good experience with the Areca cards in FreeBSD (recent
stable).

Bob

> 
> --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?
> 
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-stable at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"

-- 
Bob Willcox                       Possessions increase to fill the space
bob at immure.com                    available for their storage.
Austin, TX                               -- Ryan