On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 11:45:27AM -0400, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
  | On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 07:49:23AM -0700, Gerald C. Simmons wrote:
  | > After suffering a HD crash on my NetBSD machine, and fortunately,
  | > subsequently being able to get ALL the data off the drive, I started
  | > thinking how nice it would have been to have that drive mirrored.
  | > 
  | > Does anyone have a recommendation for a RAID 0 IDE card that NetBSD
  | > would easily support mirroring on?
  | 
  | I believe you mean RAID *1*. 0's slicing, 1's mirroring.
  | 
  | I'm not aware of any IDE-based RAID hardware (which doesn't mean it
  | doesn't exist), but is there something wrong with just using
  | RAIDframe for this? See raid(4) and raidctl(8).

NetBSD supports a variety of IDE (ATA) RAID cards.

The ones which are "real" RAID versus "mickey-mouse" `BIOS raid' include:

    *	Adaptec 2400A.
	Support for 4 drives.
	CLI management tools work under NetBSD. 
	The performance isn't too great though (dd seems to peak at
	about 10MB/s; I suspect badly written firmware given that a
	dd on a component disk on the same card get's > 40MB/s)
	NetBSD 1.6 supports this out of the box.
	[I own a 2400A, and had a 2100S in the past]

    *	3Ware Escalade series, including 75xx and 85xx.
	Supports 4, 8, or 12 drives (depending on model).
	Command-line management tools available.
	Performance is very good for RAID-1, and the 75xx/85xx has RAID-5
	acceleration (although I have not personally tested that.)
	The 85xx cards are SATA (serial ATA) instead of ATA.
	NetBSD 1.6 supports this out of the box.
	[I use a 6400 in my main file server]

    *	Intel (ICP Vortex) SRCS14L "taft" cards.
	4 channel SATA.
	CLI management tools are available.
	Performance is quite good from what I've seen.
	You may need -current to support this.
	FYI: Adaptec recently purchased this division off Intel.


In all of these cases, you configure a RAID-1 mirror in the BIOS, and
when NetBSD boots it just sees the RAID set as a single "ld0".


If I was buying a RAID card & disks today, I'd get a 3Ware 8500-4 or
an Adaptec(Intel(ICP)) SCRC14L card, both of which support 4 SATA disks.


Luke.