[nycbug-talk] Advice on setting up a RAID array

[Matador]

As far as a raid card that works out of the box with FreeBSD 5.x.

I can tell you from experience, that the Adaptec 2410SA does a nice job.

# dmesg | grep aacd
aacd0: <RAID 1 (Mirror)> on aac0
aacd0: 76292MB (156247808 sectors)

When I first booted up from bootable cd to install the o/s ; I was 
delighted to see /dev/aacd0 as my drive to partition.

This is the reason why I got the card.

Its a 4 port SATA card.  As far as getting > 500gb ; well you'd most 
likely have to go with 4 * 200+ gig hard drives to acheive it.

I can tell you, it was fun running the raid 1 and pulling out a sata 
cable while the o/s and process' were running.

I was doing a Beavis and Butthead type laugh as I did it.  Then I 
reconnected the cable, rebooted, went to adaptec's config bios, and saw 
the drive rebuilding the array.

Then I rebooted, and of course the o/s booted.

Then I pulled the #1 cable (the one that it was rebuilding *FROM*) ; 
rebooted, and when I restarted, I lost all data.

Anyway, 2410 has my thumbs up.

Cheers,

--Matador


Jonathan wrote:

> Hello all,
>     I'm thinking about setting up a RAID array for my computer for a few 
> reasons:
> 1.  I'm really bad about backups and I have too much information that is 
> reorganized too often to try to backup on CDs
> 2.  I'd like to have more hard drive space for future use
> 3.  I have some money to spend :) and I have not spent any on computers 
> for over 6 months :(
> 
>     The main things I am looking for with the RAID array are (not 
> necessarily in priority order):
> 1.  Size, I'd like to go 500GB+
> 2.  Redundancy, the main requirement I'm planning to try and mitigate 
> any crashes considering I have no backups (I do know hard drive crashes 
> are not the only thing that can destroy data but hard drive crashes are 
> my main concern)
> 3.  Preferably Hardware RAID so it is more compatible across OSes and 
> performs better.
> 4.  SATA, I don't know if this is even an option yet but SATA would be 
> very nice esp. considering 18in IDE cables can't reach anywhere near the 
> top of my case where I would need to put the drives.
> 5.  Compatibility, I don't doubt whatever I get would work under windows 
> but I also want to be sure it will work under the BSDs (FreeBSD-current 
> won't boot right now but I want to try  NetBSD one of these days 
> (5.2.1-release does work for some reason))
> 
> Awaiting much helpful advice ;)
> Jonathan
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