[nycbug-talk] FreeBSD SATA Raid Controllers

[Mike Sawicki]

On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 02:35:40PM -0400, Isaac Levy wrote:
> Thanks Dave,
> 
> On Sep 9, 2004, at 2:23 PM, Dave Steinberg wrote:
> 
> >>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
> 
> In this case, I'm simply needing to setup 1 small-ish system, so the 
> internal solution looks interesting- Thanks!
> 

I have used 3ware IDE raid controllers on FreeBSD with much success.
AFAIK the newer SATA boards are also supported by the driver.  You
have to use 3dm (3ware's Linux management server ported over to
FreeBSD) to manage the card.. but 3dm does take care of email alerts
and some other automated functions.  Rebuilds can be done via the
3dm web interface, and I suppose you could write your own tools for
parsing the 3dm output into something more cli-friendly.

I don't think the 3ware cards interoperate with atacontrol.

Mike Sawicki (fifi at HAX.ORG)