On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 11:08:05AM -0800, Raj Chahal x114 wrote:
> Which is the current Ultra 2 PCI RAID controller supported by NetBSD.
> Thanks,

There's a few available. Under netbsd-current I'm successfully using
an Adaptec 2100S with 2 x 18GB IBM LVD disks and an LVD DDS-4 tape drive.

Other supported SCSI RAID cards should include:
	cac	Compaq Array Controllers
	dpt	DPT SmartCache/SmartRAID III/IV
	iop	DPT SmartRAID V, Adaptec 2100S & 3200S, (other i2o cards?)...
	mlx	Mylex DAC960, DEC SWXCR

On the IDE RAID front, I've recently been testing a 3Ware Escalade 3W-6400
IDE RAID card (twe).  My initial feeling is that this is a good bang/buck
unit, especially considering that the drives are 1/4 the $/GB. I'm
testing 2, 3, and 4 x IBM IDE ATA100 drives in various configurations
such as raid0, raid1, raid1+0, and raid5.  My current observations
have been that the raw drives get ~ 20MB/s read/write, 2 disk raid0 is
about 23-25 MB/s read/write, 2 disk raid1 is 23-25MB/s read/write,
3 disk raid5 is 25-27MB/s read and 3-4 MB/s write (yes, 6 times slower!).
I haven't tested any 4 disk combo yet, but I will in the near future
(I need to free up the drive).

I've also used raidframe on IDE and SCSI; on IDE is sucks for
serious multiuser use because of IDE limititations (Thor Simon -
tls@netbsd.org - has a good explanation for this), and SCSI wasn't
too bad under raidframe, but I didn't have the capacity and the
motherboard I was using with on-board SCSI fried itself so I had
to give it up until I got the SCSI raid card.

Because I want reliability *and* speed raid1 and raid1+0 is going to be
my preferred option. I'm leaning towards recommending the 3Ware as a
good bang/buck card at the low end, but you're limited by IDE cable
length, and any of the hardware SCSI solutions with the optional
battery backup for the RAM cache (making it NVRAM) for high end
solutions when you've got moderate buckets of cash.


Many thanks go to Andrew Doran (ad@netbsd.org) for getting the support
for most (all?) of these cards into NetBSD!