Recommended SATA controllers

[Tim Aslat]

In the immortal words of Adriaan de Groot  on 05/19/07 18:26:
> Various Promise controllers (TX2, TX4, 4302) fall in the high end of that 
> range, as do (PCI 2-port) SiI 3112 controllers. There's also the SiI 3124 
> (PCI-X 4-port) and SiI 3132 (PCIe x1 2-port) but those are in -CURRENT only 
> or you need to MFC them yourself (I can give you a tarball of that, but 
> obviously those are all way off the supported track). Those SiI cards will go 
> for about $30, I think.

I'm running (well, trying to) the TX2 card from Promise but I've had no 
end of trouble lately with it losing drives.  I'm actually suspecting 
the mainboard as the board has been suspect for some time, but since 
this is a backup server I was hoping I might have gotten away with it.

Alas, in the gmirror raid configuration I have, I regularly lose at 
least one and sometimes both drives, and my only option is to power off 
the machine and restart.  This problem has been getting progressively 
worse now over the past couple of weeks, and I'm not sure if it's the 
controller or the mainboard.

Anyone else having this problem?

Incidentally, the machine is running a reasonably recent version of 
FreeNAS (based on 6.2 Release) 1G Ram and p4 CPU.  I don't know offhand 
the mainboard spec but I can find out if it's needed.

Hopefully someone can tell me it's the mainboard rather than the 
controller, since it's going to be easier getting a new mainboard.

Cheers

Tim

-- 
Tim Aslat <tim at spyderweb.com.au>
Spyderweb Consulting
http://www.spyderweb.com.au
Mobile: +61 0401088479