Good SATA II 3.0Gb controller for FreeBSD 6.x/amd64

[Freddie Cash]

On Tuesday 07 November 2006 09:18 am, Gabriele Cecchetti wrote:
> Any suggestion for a good SATA II 3Gb controller for FreeBSD 6.x/amd64
> ? I prefer controller with
> - stable and working driver (not beta driver or with some problem)
> - command-line utilities as needed (create and rebuilt array on the
> fly) - good performance with RAID5 with every operation done by
> hardware (My CPU has no time to do XOR calculations and other raid
> stuff :-)) - PCIExpress interface (not PCI-X!)
> - more than 4 ports (6 or 8 ports)
>
> Hot plug support is not a must (I can turn off the machine for 15
> minutes to plug another drive)
>
> My hardware is Asus P5B and Intel E6300 (working with amd64).
> The disks are 4x300GB SATA II at the moment but they may grow in
> number.

Areca and AMCC 3Ware both make very nice hardware RAID controllers, and 
are both well-supported on/by FreeBSD.  Both make PCI-X and PCIe models.

We use the AMCC 3Ware Escalade 9550-series of controllers without issue on 
FreeBSD 6.0 and 6.1 (only the 4-port models) and on Debian Linux (2.6.16+ 
kernel, 12-port models) both 32-bit and 64-bit.  The CLI and web 
management tools are very nice and usable.

Supposedly the Areca cards are faster, but I've never used on so can't 
compare.  We didn't know about Areca when we started searching for RAID 
controllers, and have standardised on 3Ware.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fcash at ocis.net