*BSD News Article 91233


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From: "brian wehrle" <brianw@aa.net>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD and RAID devices
Date: 16 Mar 1997 10:17:38 GMT
Organization: Alternate Access Incorporated
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Yes, although there are basically two ways to go:
1) raid in the controller ( DPT, AMI and Buslogic all make cards I believe
that do this sort of RAID
that is all committed to disk)
2) a RAID box, such as made by Symbios, HP or Clariion.  The boxes are
quite expensive.
I would look at buslogic or DPT, as I believe that you will be able to find
drivers for them.
But yes, to the OS, the drives look dumb, and the cards will use ordinary
SCSI drives.
RAID in software is generally less expensive because you can use cheaper
hardware, but rather less FT that harware raid configurations.  And
software RAID eats CPU cycles and can slow disk IO (of course, depending on
the operation (read,write) and the RAID you are using).  

Brian



Kurt Schafer <kschafer@cyberbeach.net> wrote in article
<01bc3102$dbcf68f0$214f96cd@reality>...
> I realize FreeBSD doesn't have any built in RAID(1-5) capabilities. (or
did
> they sneak that in lately and not tell me ?)
> 
> I'd like to add some fault tolerance to our FBSD network. Can anybody
> recommend a good external unit ? I've heard you can get RAID units that
> essentially make your disk array look like one SCSI device to the
> controller.
> 
> Our SCSI controllers are Adaptec 2940-UW's
> 
> -Kurt
>