[nycbug-talk] cheap way to add drives to a 1U?

[Jonathan]

On 10/28/2009 11:15 PM, Charles Sprickman wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Oct 2009, Pete Wright wrote:
>
>> sun just released a patch to solaris 10 that allows you to drop in SSD
>> drives into your zpool config which can be used as caches which
>> in theory should give similar benefits of RAID controllers with BBU's.
>> but thats solaris not in fbsd yet...soon hopefully though :)
>
> What host adapters are you using on the FBSD boxes?  Some time ago I was
> cautioned against basically all Highpoint and SIIS cards on -stable.  It's
> pretty slim pickings once you take those brands out of the mix.

I've had good luck with my LSI SAS controller [1] even with standard 
SATA consumer drives.  I believe I saw something about a new management 
tool for FreeBSD recently but I haven't had to change anything for a 
couple of years so I haven't looked into it.  I know having to go into 
the card BIOS to make changes was a major blocking point for a long 
while for some people.

On a related note does anyone know of SAS or SATA port multipliers that 
work with FBSD for <$10 dollars/port?

I can't speak for SIIS but I bought a 2 port highpoint SATA controller 
years ago that gave me silent data corruption, thankfully  I still had 
alternate copies of my data.  I haven't gone near highpoint hardware since.

Jonathan

[1] 
http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/host_bus_adapters/sas_hbas/internal/sas3081e-r/index.html