[nycbug-talk] FreeBSD SATA Raid Controllers

[Dave Steinberg]

> I found sparse info online, but wanted to know if anyone had any 
> experience with 4 channel SATA Raid Controllers on FreeBSD?  I want to 
> make sure that atacontrol(8) would work for live raid rebuilds etc...
>
> Thanks for any info or urls...

While not of direct interest, I can summarize some similar research I 
did for raid arrays on OpenBSD.  The short of it is that none of the 
vendor utilities to manage arrays / do rebuilds / get notifications are 
supported.  Supposedly many vendors do have support for FreeBSD (or 
many more ... perhaps solely by comparison).  I would be wary of your 
ability to get disk failure notifications.

You might consider a different setup, something like a self-contained 
raid unit (either internal or external) from Accusys.  I am planning on 
rolling out an NFS server who's store is on an accuta 4 
(http://www.accusys-store.com/ACUTA4_spec.htm) in the next couple days 
/ weeks.  I've heard other reports from people that these are generally 
reliable products, and work well with Free/OpenBSD.

Good luck,
-- 
Dave