On Thu, 27 Apr 2006, Carl Brewer wrote:

> Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 02:17:06PM +1000, Carl Brewer wrote:
>>>> 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).
>> 
>> I'd recommend against that controller.  I am not even entirely sure
>> it will work with the aac driver (that driver has needed an update
>> for a long, long time).  If you're willing to settle for a controller
>> without online managment tools for NetBSD (also true of the Adaptec)
>> you might consider the LSI MegaRAID instead -- the 150-4, 150-6, or
>> 300.
>
> The more I think about it, the more I'm leaning towards S/W RAID1,
> getting rid of the need for possibly dodgey support for these
> controllers.

 	I normally chime in at this point in such discussions.

 	I'm running RAID1 raidframe on just about all of my NetBSD
 	boxes, even dedicated servers. The only exceptions being
 	laptops and the occasional test scratch box. The slowdown
 	for a parity rebuild in the case of an unclean shutdown is
 	annoying, but otherwise I've been extremely happy with the
 	result. Maybe that would be a nice SoC project...

 	I'd recommend getting disks from different vendors of ~
 	the same size and picking the smaller size for the raid -
 	reduces the likelyhood of two disks failing at the same
 	time (thankyou maxtor). The only time I break that rule is
 	with WD Raptors, but for the massively better seek times
 	I'm prepared to compromise :)

-- 
 		David/absolute       -- www.NetBSD.org: No hype required --