Carl Brewer wrote:
> 
> 
> I'm trying to put together a half decent home server with
> around 400-500 gig of disk space and some redundancy - I
> can get 3 x 300GB IDA or SATA disks quite cheap, or 2 400GB for
> quite a bit more... So I think maybe HW RAID5. or raid-Z
> if I have a change in tack and look at opensolaris or ZFS gets
> ported to NetBSD?  I don't want to take the performance hit on
> s/w RAID5, as I'm hoping to run this as a xen server at some point
> and want all the CPU I can get if and when I do that.  This will be
> going into a desktop style case and will not use SCSI (the disks are
> just way too expensive).  If I'm wrong and s/w RAID 5 doesn't suck (my
> experience with s/w RAID5 was on an old Sun E450 with 3 x 36GB SCSI
> disks running SunOS 5.8 and it was a -dog-) then I'm happy to be
> corrected for my false assumption!
> 
> Looking through the hardware support pages on the netbsd.org site
> there's a bundle of different controllers listed here :
> 
> http://www.netbsd.org/Hardware/pci.html
> 
> But I don't know which of them is much good, so throw myself
> open to the wisdom of the list.  Any suggestions?  What's good
> and cheap (I know ...) and easy to get hold of?

Further to this, I can get the Adaptec 2410SA at an affordable
price (it's around $500 AUD - roughly the cost of a 400GB HDD).
With that in mind, I'm leaning more towards a RAID1 setup
instead as I guess the extra cost for the controller gets rid of
the cost difference (not to mention the extra power consumption from
3 disks, heat, noise etc).

Am I crazy?