classiccmp server hardware

At 16:12 11/10/2004, Fred N. van Kempen wrote: In my experience, running servers purely as a hobby, I've found the version of RAID1 as presented by cheap ATA controllers on FreeBSD more than adequate, a considerable speed up than a single drive, and definitely better than not having a raid, when a drive goes down!! I've used various cards (mostly SiL 0680 chipset) on FreeBSD without problem. At least on the 0680, they do write something to the disc, as taking the drives out of one machine and putting them on a different card in a different machine caused them to be spotted as a RAID pair before the OS had even had a chance to boot. Drives can be removed, and they do work on their own however too, so I don't know what gets stored where? You can mirror on FreeBSD using either vimum, which is pure software raid and will work across any drives no matter what types or controllers they are on (even a mix) or for most ATA IDE RAID cards, the ata driver has built in support (`man atacontrol`) which I presume negotiates with the card bios and sorts out who does what. Oh, as far as the SiL0680 specifically is concerned, from personal experience FreeBSD 4.10 works fine... 5.2 works, but 5.2.1 panics on boot (even booting the install). Later snapshots are OK again though, but for the moment 4.10 is still recommended for production servers, at least until 5.3 is out, which is apparently only a couple of weeks off. 5.3 apparently offers some new facilities (geom_vinum and gmirror) but I've not used them, or anything later than 5.2 yet, just seen them discussed while sorting out beta bugs on the freebsd-current list. Rob.