hardware for home use large storage

[Charles Sprickman]

On Tue, 9 Feb 2010, Dan Langille wrote:

> Charles Sprickman wrote:
>> On Mon, 8 Feb 2010, Dan Langille wrote:
>> 
>> Also, it seems like
>> people who use zfs (or gmirror + gstripe) generally end up buying pricey 
>> hardware raid cards for compatibility reasons.  There seem to be no decent 
>> add-on SATA cards that play nice with FreeBSD other than that weird 
>> supermicro card that has to be physically hacked about to fit.
>
> They use software RAID and hardware RAID at the same time?  I'm not sure what 
> you mean by this.  Compatibility with FreeBSD?

>From what I've seen on this list, people buy a nice Areca or 3Ware card 
and put it in JBOD mode and run ZFS on top of the drives.  The card is 
just being used to get lots of sata ports with a stable driver and known 
good hardware.  I've asked here a few times in the last few years for 
recommendations on a cheap SATA card and it seems like such a thing does 
not exist.  This might be a bit dated at this point, but you're playing it 
safe if you go with a 3ware/Areca/LSI card.

I don't recall all the details, but there were issues with siil, 
highpoint, etc.  IIRC it was not really FBSD's issue, but bugginess in 
those cards.  The intel ICH9 chipset works well, but there are no add-on 
PCIe cards that have an intel chip on them...

I'm sure someone will correct me if my info is now outdated or flat-out 
wrong. :)

Charles