# Suggestions for 12/16 SATA port RAID card for FreeBSD 8?



## ghell (Apr 3, 2010)

I'm currently using 4 SATA ports on my motherboard and 8 SATA ports via mini-SAS cables from a Highpoint RocketRAID 2680 to connect 12 drives to FreeBSD 7.2 for ZFS.

It looks like the RocketRAID is never going to support FreeBSD 8, since none of their cards do according to their website.

Does anyone have any suggestions for alternatives that do work in FreeBSD 8? Preferably as low cost as possible, but with half decent performance?


----------



## SirDice (Apr 3, 2010)

ghell said:
			
		

> It looks like the RocketRAID is never going to support FreeBSD 8, since none of their cards do according to their website.


They do:

```
dice@williscorto:~>apropos rocketraid
hptiop(4)                - HighPoint RocketRAID 3xxx/4xxx device driver
hptmv(4)                 - HighPoint RocketRAID 182x device driver
hptrr(4)                 - HighPoint RocketRAID device driver
```

Since you're going to use ZFS anyway why not get a card _without_ any RAID onboard? You can get a cheap 4 port PCI card for about 59 euro.


----------



## ghell (Apr 3, 2010)

OK thanks for the info but "according to their website" (e.g. the 4322, they don't.

I know from experience that the 2680 that I have does not work with the hptrr driver, and I had to get the specific driver from their site instead.


As for RAID/ZFS the reason is that I want to check the performance of ZFS on FreeBSD 8.0. If I'm going to get a new card, I'd prefer a 12 or 16 port card that I can put in RAID50 if ZFS performance is not good enough for my needs. I'd prefer to stick to ZFS because of the flexibility and the ease of migration from FreeBSD 7.2 but at the moment, on 7.2, ZFS doesn't quite give me the performance I need. If it doesn't on 8.0 either, I will need a proper RAID controller to switch to.


----------



## SirDice (Apr 3, 2010)

Ah. What you want is to steer clear of any fakeRAID solutions. These all require a driver to operate. You really want a full RAID controller that works independent of the installed OS.


----------



## ghell (Apr 3, 2010)

That would be ideal but unfortunately they are prohibitively priced.

For the performance I don't need a crazy amount, I just want it to be roughly the same as my gigabit ethernet. I can easily get 120MB/s (~980mbps) transfer between two single drives on two Linux boxes, but when I use ZFS with the same drives on a decent enough machine (quad core etc, should all be fine) I get nowhere near that performance on either reading or writing. Some of the content on there needs to be streamed in real time but it just cant handle it.

If I could just get the same performance as I get out of a single drive, I would be happy.


----------



## phoenix (Apr 6, 2010)

3Ware, Areca, and LSI (not MegaRAID line) are very well supported on FreeBSD, as these companies have FreeBSD developers on staff, and the drivers are included in FreeBSD releases.  We have excellent experiences with 3Ware gear (7000, 9000, 9550, 9650) on FreeBSD 6+.

We use 9550SXU PCI-X and 9650SE PCIe 12-port controllers in our ZFS boxes, configuring each disk as a "Single Disk" array.  Using Single Disk instead of JBOD enables all the management features, onboard cache, and other advanced features, without enabling any of the actual RAID hardware.


----------



## ghell (Jul 21, 2010)

I haven't looked back into this for a while but would the Areca ARC-1300ix-16 work in FreeBSD 8.0 (and 8.1, if that will be released soon)?

It's a non-RAID card, PCIe x4, with 4 internal 8087 SAS connectors, which should be ideal for a 12 to 16 drive ZFS. Also has 2 external 8088s that I wouldn't use. Â£325 is not _too_ expensive either.


Also, considering that my current setup is 4 drives connected to SATA on the motherboard and 8 to a RocketRAID 2680 (each drive in "LEGACY" mode), would I be able to just plug them into this card and have them detected or would I need to do something to them? I just ask because it was a pain to get them into legacy mode on the 2680 (new drives required pre-formatting, with a blank partition table) and if I need to do something similar to get them to work on this, I have nowhere to move my data to while it happens.


----------



## Matty (Jul 22, 2010)

ghell said:
			
		

> I haven't looked back into this for a while but would the Areca ARC-1300ix-16 work in FreeBSD 8.0 (and 8.1, if that will be released soon)?
> 
> It's a non-RAID card, PCIe x4, with 4 internal 8087 SAS connectors, which should be ideal for a 12 to 16 drive ZFS. Also has 2 external 8088s that I wouldn't use. Â£325 is not _too_ expensive either.
> 
> ...



On May 20 I got this email:



> Dear Sir/Madam,
> 
> i am sorry, the schedule of ARC1300 freebsd driver been delayed, it may need
> couple months.
> ...


----------



## ghell (Aug 19, 2010)

Matty said:
			
		

> On May 20 I got this email:



Any news on this yet?

The website says





> BSD/FreeBSD (will be available at the end of Q1 2010 for the 3Gb/s Host Adaptor and the new 6Gb/s Host Adapter)



The downloads still only lists Windows, Linux and OS X drivers though.


----------



## Matty (Aug 20, 2010)

ghell said:
			
		

> Any news on this yet?
> 
> The website says
> 
> The downloads still only lists Windows, Linux and OS X drivers though.



Well of course not. x(

Guess resources for other then linux and windows are low.

How hard is it to write a hba driver...


----------



## Matty (Aug 31, 2010)

Anyways I bought a supermicro AOC-USAS-L8i (8 ports) and it works great. The webshop made a mistake and priced it at 117 euro instead of 144 euro 
It's cheaper then the Areca 4 ports and has  a *working* driver.

Oh and it looks like there will never come a freebsd driver 
From the website:
	Operating System
 		Windows Vista/2003/XP/2000: SCSIport/Storport (32-bit and x64)
 		Red Hat Linux, SuSE Linux, and Fedora Core (32-bit and x64)
 		Mac OS X 10.4.X and 10.5 Leopard (no-bootable)

Thats really a shame

EDIT:


```
Dear Sir/Madam,

i am sorry, it is not stop but delayed.
the freebsd driver should available in couple months if no additional bug
found.
i will mail you a notice as soon as the 1300 freebsd driver released, sorry
for the inconvenience.

Best Regards,

Kevin Wang
```


----------

