OpenBSD Journal

Favourable review of Transparent PATA/SATA RAID 1 for OpenBSD

Contributed by grey on from the thanks for the submissions dept.

Amir Mesry writes in to let us know about some positive hardware experience he's had with the following:

I have been using these products in my openbsd boxes to setup RAID 1 drive arrays without the hassle of using the CCD driver or any Hardware RAID drivers. It works like a charm and makes it easy to have a simple hard drive failover solution for OpenBSD or any unix for that matter. DataProtection Solutions by Arco is the place to find the products. They work wonderfully. If your looking for a transparent RAID solution thats invisble to the OS, this is the way to go!

I'd also like to point out readers to the Section 14 of the FAQ which mentions several other vendors offering similar products. Of course, you don't have to used dedicated hardware, when OpenBSD ships with support for RAID in software.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Dave Steinberg (66.192.34.8) dave@redterror.net on http://www.geekisp.com/

    I've had pretty good success so far with this similar product from Accusys. The monitoring app is native for Windows / Linux, but they were kind enough to release a document to me to allow me to write my own (or, get about 75% done and get pulled off onto another project).

    Overall the document they sent is very good, but it does contain some errors. The contact I had at Accusys was ultimately not responsive about my questions regarding the errors - and I haven't had time to press the issue.

    Mind you, there are no tools to reconfigure the raid set - its all handled by jumpers on the back of the box. So its not a fancy setup, but it does fit a need.

    If anyone is interested in a copy of the PDF, or in the work that I've done so far with my own version of the monitor app, just drop me an email.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (66.167.102.27) on

      I had NO idea this was that expensive. I was always suspicious of the RAID-for-IDE cards because, well, why would they need a driver? The prices of the pure hardware cards, even for just RAID 1, blows me away.

  2. By Anonymous Coward (205.201.29.47) on

    Does OpenBSD support 3ware-9500? FreeBSD does, since those are the best SATA/RAID cards on the market...

    Comments

    1. By Brad (216.138.200.42) brad at comstyle dot com on

      They are not the best..

    2. By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on

      How do you figure? ICP and LSI are both significantly better than 3ware, and likely so are others. 3ware are cheapass controllers.

  3. By Anonymous Coward (80.90.9.18) on

    "Of course, you don't have to used dedicated hardware, when OpenBSD ships with support for RAID in software."
    lol.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (205.201.29.47) on

      yeah, that sentence is retard, software raid is much slower than hardware raid, but who said openbsd was fast anyway heh.

      Comments

      1. By mike (80.219.121.189) on

        there are areas where speed is not the determining factor, think price or space or whatever else you prefer.

        with software raid I can slap two large ide disks onto a c3 motherboard and voila: a tiny raid 1 file-server that is quiet and cheap.

        if you make multiple raid sets it decreases the time needed to rebuild parity to something reasonable.

      2. By henning (80.86.183.226) henning on

        plain bullshit. modern softraid is faster than hardware RAID, due to the sheer processing power available.

        there is still a LOT of very good reasons to go with hardware RAID tho.

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on

          Well that depends on what controller you use. Good controllers are most certainly faster than openbsd's raidframe. Do some bonnie benchmarks on a raidframe mirror and a gdt one before claiming software raid is faster.

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward (205.201.1.215) on

            I hate this forum, most of the people here have no clue what they're talking about, they all pretend to be 1337, one mention bonnie to benchmark a raid (dumbass) one mentions that software raid is faster than hardware raid (hey, we're in the 21st century you know, you can throw away your DPT III raid card) others are plain stupid, is that what the openbsd community is about? I'm sincerely disappointed.

            Comments

            1. By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on

              And best of all, trolls with nothing to add that simply call everyone else dumb, with nothing to back it up. Is this what the troll community is all about?

  4. By Simon (217.157.132.75) on

    How about feedback? Nice that it works, but I want my servers to tell me when a disk fails. A lot of people don't visit their server room every day, so a notification email would be nice. How does the Arco solution manage that?

    Same thing with most hardware RAID solution, sure, they work, but if they don't tell me when a disk fails, it some how becomes less useful. With RAIDFrame I know that the operating system can inform me about failures.

    Personally, I would like a list of hardware RAID solutions which has drivers providing feedback, not just a list of which will allow me to access the disks.

    Comments

    1. By Cameron (63.93.197.67) on

      The PCI version has an external serial port for setup and diagnostics which could easily be looped back to the motherboard serial connector. Then a little expect script could be written to interact with the controller via the serial port to get status information. Not the best, but it should work.

  5. By Anonymous Coward (131.241.8.250) on

    I don't have flash installed, so maybe that's why, but ...

    Isn't this the most content-free website you've seen recently? From what I can tell, each of the products has about a 1 paragraph description of it. That's all. No FAQs or user manuals or other documentation.

    Where's the documentation? Have I overlooked a link?

  6. By Anonymous Coward (66.91.22.5) on

    I like RAIDFrame.
    It works fine for me and is very cheap (free)

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