Re: raid backup

From: Michael Vince (michael_at_roq.com)
Date: 05/25/04

  • Next message: Petri Helenius: "Re: raid backup" 
    Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 11:49:14 +1000
To: Maksymilian Wrzesinski <mcson@obta.uw.edu.pl>

    Maksymilian Wrzesinski wrote:
    > hello,
    >
    > what would you recommend as good (and cheap) solution for backup raid?
    > i need two 120gb hard disks connected in a proper mode to the
    > controller to back up one another.
    >
    > what chips on controllers are fast and reliable - and still being
    > cheaplike silicon image ata controllers? are they supoorted by
    > freebsd?
    >
    > tia,
    >

    I have been keeping my eye out for cheap hardware based RAID solutions
    my self all the addon cards still seem to be either cheap software
    based? stuff from taiwan or expensive and often slow addon cards that
    have questionable support for FreeBSD

    It seems that the the Nforce3 250gb from Nvidia has hardware based raid
    built into their chipset for motherboards with a lot of top shelf
    features such as hotswap for SATA and both SATA and IDE RAID that can be
    combined
    http://www.anandtech.com/chipsets/showdoc.html?i=2009
    Quote from anandtech

    'Other questions regarded Linux support on nForce3-250Gb. Nvidia
    emphasizes full support for Linux in their literature for nF3-250. We
    were assured that nF3-250 features will have drivers available for Linux
    if they are needed, and that all features will work in Linux. Linux
    users should be reassured to know that Linux was a significant part of
    the nVidia presentation - not a thrown-in afterthought as we often see
    when it comes to Linux.'

    I am guessing this motherboard chipset would work well as RAID, it
    shouldn't matter what what OS you run as it is true hardware based RAID,
    I am assuming with FreeBSD we would miss out of some utils to query the
    raid as to the status of the HDs but I would hope that FreeBSD would
    eventually get the same tools as that would be available for Linux

    The performance should be good as well since they have the benchmarks
    are there and compare to the intel stuff if you have seen some of
    benchmarks of some of the 'high performance?' addon raid cards that
    anadtech have benchmarked over time you will be shocked to see how slow
    and crappy some of them are!

    The Nforce3 250gb is for AMD 64 CPUs only but they have also just
    released the same technology for the Athlon XP series called Nforce2
    Ultra 400gb which would make a very cheap and powerful solution.
    http://www.anandtech.com/chipsets/showdoc.html?i=2051

    The latest Intel chipsets don't seem to be to far behind as far as I can
    tell but they don't offer things like hot swap etc.
    Still as I said I have just been watching out I am not sure how well
    this stuff would work on FreeBSD but I am thinking in theory it should
    be OK.
    If any one really knows and has tested with them it would be great to
    hear about it. 

    -- 
PGP ID: 0x4F163152
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