On Wed, 7 Aug 2002, Luke Mewburn wrote:

>   | So, can anyone provide me with their experiences using hardware RAID under
>   | NetBSD?  I have to travel to another city to do this job, and it would be
>   | disasterous to find out when I get there that the RAID card they ordered
>   | for me won't work well in NetBSD.
>   |
>   | I'd also be willing to try RaidFrame instead of a hardware RAID controller
>   | as long as the performance wasn't too bad and swapping a bad drive isn't
>   | too hard.
>
> Hardware RAID using the Adaptec (rebadged DPT) cards such as the
> 21xxS, 2400A, and 3xxxS I2O cards works very well for me.
> I have used a 2100S with SCSI, and currently use a 2400A with IDE in
> my primary server, and another machine has a 3Ware 6400 with IDE
> disks.  The management software of the Adaptec [23]xxx RAID cards
> is quite good too; I run the Linux s/w in emulation mode.
>
> I've also used RAIDframe on SCSI and IDE.  RAIDframe on IDE, even with
> a separate primary channel (across multiple controllers) really
> started to feel "sucky" with > 2 drives.  Also, it won't be possible
> to get NetBSD to boot off a RAID-5 RAIDframe volume at this time.
> Getting NetBSD/i386 to boot off a RAID-1 RAIDframe volume is non
> trivial as well.
>
> Contrary to other assertions made in this thread, I think that you'll
> find that setting up hardware RAID-5 behind a 2110S will be really
> easy; you set up the volume in the BIOS and start it initiasing. You
> boot up NetBSD media which understands the card in question (e.g,
> 1.6_BETA5), and you're presented with a single logical disk (`ld0')
> which you can create MBR partitions and a NetBSD disklabel on, and it
> can be set to boot from like any other "BIOS" disk on a PC.

Thank you very much for your detailed and informative response.  This is
what I was expecting.  I will order a 2100S and hope it works properly in
NetBSD 1.5-release.  I was hoping to install 1.6 for this project, but
I think I better avoid it until the I/O scheduling is fixed - I get some
pretty bad pauses just on my personal machine, I'd hate to see what would
happen in a heavily loaded server environmenet.

Thanks again,
	Rick