[ale] Spec'ing a FreeBSD box, need some help

Jonathan Chum jchum at aismedia.com
Wed Dec 4 10:37:52 EST 2002


The primary use of this machine is for web hosting and some database
operations.

I did some research and it turns out that FreeBSD 4.7 only supports a few
Ultra 320 RAID cards by Adaptec. The 2000S Raid card utilize the onboard
SCSI chipset on the MotherBoard however, it turns out to be compatible with
a few SuperMicro motherboards and not the new onboard Ultra 320 SCSI.

I thought it was backward compatible, but I guess it isn't . .. based on
some docs on Adaptec's web site. For now, I have to deal with Ultra 160(320)
board and RAID card until FreeBSD releases new drivers to support Ultra320s.

Hopefully there will be a RAID card that supports Adaptec AIC-7899W chipset
so there is no need to upgrade the board, only the drives and card if/when
that hapens.

I couldn't find anything regarding whether Ultra320 Seagate Cheetah drives
are backward compatible with Ultra160 RAID card, so I'm going down that path
with purchasing Ultra160 Cheetah drives as well even though Seagate is
transitioning over to Ultra320 drives.


Regards,
Jonathan Chum
Systems Developer

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-----Original Message-----
From: ale-admin at ale.org [mailto:ale-admin at ale.org]On Behalf Of Jeff
To: ale at ale.org
Hubbs
Sent: Tuesday, December 03, 2002 6:23 PM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] Spec'ing a FreeBSD box, need some help





> The problem I'm having to decide is whether an Ultra 160 RAID card is
first
> compaitable with an Ultra 320 SCSI controller. I've seen sites that is
> selling the unit with the Adaptec Ultra 160 so I think that part is fine,
> but I just want to verify.

As far as the OS is concerned, the Ultra 160 SCSI RAID card and the
onboard Ultra 320 SCSI controller are going to be sitting side-by-side;
one won't be depending on the other.

I don't know what you're planning to use the machine for, but I would
definitely want to take advantage of having two Ultra320 controllers
sitting there in addition to the Ultra160 RAID card.  I don't know if
FreeBSD does multiple swap partitions or software RAID, but putting swap
partitions on separate drives across the controllers comes to mind,
especially if this machine is maxed out on RAM but will get pounded on
swap regardless.  Otherwise, I'd want to use them in a software RAID
arrangement (RAID 1 or RAID 0+1, splitting mirrors across the
controllers).  If the machine isn't going to be swapping its brains out,
I might try to put /, /usr, and whatnot on its own volume (RAID 1 or a
3-disk RAID 5) on the RAID card and use the onboard Ultra320 controllers
for RAID 0+1 sets, going for sheer speed with fault tolerance.

- Jeff

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