3Ware 9500SX vs. Old Fibre Channel

[Charles Sprickman]

Hi all,

I'm looking for a little help on making a hardware decision here.  I'm 
going to be upgrading an existing mail server and I have a certain amount 
of things on-hand.  I essentially have two options as far as storage goes:

-3Ware 9500SX 12 port RAID card
-9 ~250MB SATA-II drives (to start - 1 as hot spare)
-new 3U case w/12 hot-swap bays

Total cost there is about $2200.

The performance of the 3Ware/SATA solution is more than adequate for our 
needs...  There are some reliability issues with SATA vs. SCSI/FC, but the 
drives are cheap enough that hot spares are an option to mitigate that. 
I've also been very happy with the reliability of the 3Ware management 
apps - no problems replacing drives without a reboot.  I can't say the 
same for the Adaptec stuff so far.

-FC RAID card
-OR FC HBA, no RAID + gvinum
-2 old NetApp FC shelves totalling ~0.5TB (have on-hand)
-new 2U case

Total cost there is about $700-$???

While I would like to use the freebie NetApp shelves, who knows how much 
life is left in them.  I also am not too sure on what (if any) currently 
shipping FC RAID HBAs are supported well under FreeBSD 6.1.  I do have a 
handful of the 9500SX cards which are outperforming most of my Adaptec 
SCSI RAID HBAs...  I'm guessing a new FC RAID HBA is going to be upwards 
of $1K.  Some interesting used Mylex product is available for a few hudred 
bucks, and I'd not be comfortable not having a spare laying around.

Some have mentioned gvinum, but I'm wondering how rough it would be too 
set that up with 14 drives in a RAID 1+0 config.  Anyone here doing that?

Any opinions on these options?

Thanks,

Charles

___
Charles Sprickman
NetEng/SysAdmin
Bway.net - New York's Best Internet - www.bway.net
spork at bway.net - 212.655.9344