sata raid card for FreeBSD?

[Gary D. Margiotta]

> Hi Gary,
>
> Thanks for your comments - I've found a Highpoint 1640 card at an
> interesting price - 4 ports, so I have room to expand in the future.  Any
> gotchas with this card as opposed to the 1542 that you've recommended?

No gotcha's at all.  I have a bunch of 1640's sitting on the shelf that I 
just got a good deal on, and I've already rolled a few of them out.  They 
work pretty well for my needs, light e-mail, webserver, file server, etc.

I will mention this - in my experience, the CPU utilization on a Windows 
system will be much higher comparitively than a BSD system running these 
cards.  I have a couple windows file servers which hit about 6MB/s file 
transfers at about 40% CPU utilization, meanwhile similarly configured BSD 
systems will push 8-9MB/s at about 20-30% utilization.  Now, these are 
older systems (AMD Athlons at around 1Ghz), but it is nice to see how well 
the BSD systems work, especially on older hardware.

-Gary


> best regards,
>
> tom
>
> On 5/9/07, Gary D. Margiotta <gary at tbe.net> wrote:
>> 
>> On Tue, 8 May 2007, Rick C. Petty wrote:
>> 
>> > On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 12:45:14AM +0200, Thomas Fischer wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Since I'm going to be accessing these files when I'm running under both
>> >> Windows and FreeBSD, the geom/gmirror solution won't work for
>> me.  Would
>> >> anyone be able to advise me on an inexpensive SATA RAID card that would
>> be
>> >> well supported by FreeBSD?  I don't need anything fancy - just
>> something
>> >> with 2 SATA ports capable of doing RAID-1, and which is (well)
>> supported by
>> >> FreeBSD (and Windows).
>> >
>> > SATA and not SATA II?  If so, then anything with the Sil 3112 chipset or
>> > similar would work:
>> >
>> > http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815104219
>> 
>> Go for a Highpoint card, something like the 1542, I've got a bunch in
>> both windows and freebsd machines, and they work rather well.  They're not
>> the speediest cards, but I've not had a DOA or a failure yet with them,
>> and they just work.
>> 
>> I'd personally stay away from the Sil chipsets, the newer ones aren't as
>> bad, but I've seen a lot of not-nice things about those cards from Soren
>> in the past, and being that he's the ATA maintainer, I'd take his advice
>> pretty seriously.
>> 
>> -Gary
>> 
>> 
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-hardware at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hardware-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>