new server motherboard with SATA II

[Danny Carroll]

Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> No, it should not happen at idle.  You said "interrupt usage across 5
> disks", which I read to mean "interrupt usage is very high during I/O
> across a zpool consisting of 5 disks".  I misunderstood.
> 
> IRQ sharing could result in what you see, but it sounds more like some
> weird interrupt routing/bug that might be specific to that Asus board.

That's kinda what I fear might be the case.

> The FreeBSD Handbook has a list of hardware.  Anything that has its own
> xxx(4) driver (e.g. twa(4), twe(4), arcmsr(4), etc.) will suffice.  Many
> of these cards handle SATA disks which appear as daX in FreeBSD, since
> they act as SCSI controllers.  SCSI CAM on FreeBSD is quite reliable.
> 
> Currently, the best SATA controllers I've seen that have native FreeBSD
> support (meaning the vendor supports FreeBSD) are Areca controllers.  I
> have no experience with them due to their cost, but they are *very*
> fast.

Ouch....   Are the any other options?
I'd be happy with a card that simply exposed the drive to FreeBSD rather 
than implemented Raid.  Although I won't rule hardware raid out either 
(given a product that was fast enough).

-D