[ On Tuesday, August 6, 2002 at 15:09:58 (-0400), Rick Byers wrote: ]
> Subject: hardware RAID support
>
> I'd like to use Raid 5 under NetBSD-1.5.3 for increased performance and
> fault tollerance.

What does this have to do with port-i386?  :-)

> 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 would suggest that if you really want to have plug&play RAID work
first time off then you want to avoid these PCI controllers and stick to
plain old SCSI-to-SCSI (or maybe IDE-to-SCSI) RAID subsystems.  They
just look like a SCSI disk to the host and they usually have a nice
simple serial console to manage their configuration.

(though personally I'd avoid Adaptec's SCSI-to-SCSI RAID controllers,
unless they've undergone an enormous amount of improvement and fixing of
their firmware in the last few years)

> 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.

RAIDframe works great, and even with RAID-5 the performance is decent
assuming you have a decent disk I/O subsystem underneath it all.
Swapping a bad drive with RAIDframe is not too difficult so long as you
have hot-swap disk bays (SCA connectors at minimum, or Kingston bays
with a built-in SCSI switch, etc.).  Greg Oster posted a discussion of
the various procedures recently.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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