Gary D. Margiotta wrote:
[snip]
I would highly recommend the HighPoint 18x0 series of controllers. I
believe the 1810 is a 4-port, and the 1820 is an 8-port SATA card. I
just installed an 1820 (just over $200 at NewEgg) on an old PII-400
dual cpu machine, and it is insanely fast. I have 4 320GB WD drives
attached to it in RAID5 config.
Highpoint has some reasonable RAID and multiport IDE and SATA cards,
and I´d bet the 18x0 series would be a good shot, since I already work
with them. It´s natively supported by FreeBSD 5.4, and has additional
support from Highpoint, what I consider a great thing, specially for
management features.
But if you´re going with 1820, I suggest you to get a 1820A, ´cause it
has an onboard XOR processor which speeds up things a bit AND frees some
CPU usage on RAID5 (important on not-so-new CPUs). ;).
However, if you don´t need RAID5, there are other options from
Highpoint itself, but I don´t have a clue about prices. I would only
not suggest vinum on RAID5 unless you have a really good machine (at
least hyperthreaded), because it drains quite a bit from the CPU, but if
it´s for personal use, or a low-end server, that could fit.
The HPT card was detected by 5.4-RELEASE right out of the box, no
tinkering needed. I installed the OS onto the RAID5 volume, and was
up and running in under an hour.
Did I mention it's insanely fast? It's running in a standard PCI
slot, since my motherboard is old, and doesn't have any 64 bit PCI
slots, but the card is OK with that, it's backwards compatible to
normal 32 bit slots for folks like me. IF you have a new motherboard
with 64 bit slots, I can only imagine how fast it would be with > 6
year old hardware.
In a last thought, speed will greately depend on the hardware you´re
using (mobo, CPU, disks etc.), but they´re indeed quite good. I really
hadn´t noticed the backwards compatibility in the specs, but it´s a nice
feature - you´ll really like it if someday you can afford a 64bit,
133MHz motherboard. :)
And, as for reliability, i have two 1820A running rock-solid, 24/7,
beside me, on 2 HP ML110 machines. It´s too early to say, since it
hasn´t been yet 6 months, but we haven´t had a single issue, even when
we decided to play with hot-swap. :)
Have luck,
Tulio G. da Silva
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