Ireneusz Pluta wrote: > Hello, > > when selecting SATA drives for gmirror, boot device, connected to an > on-board controller, should I look for so-called "enterprise grade", or > "raid edition" drives (like for instance > http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=40), or I should rather > focus on models closer to "consumer grade"? Will gmirror configuration > significantly benefit from things like TLER, or it would rather be > harmful, like when using these disks as single ones in desktop > applications? > This is an overly broad generalization, but I would tend to match RE drives with expensive hardware-only RAID controllers. They are touchy and really designed with TLER in mind. On the other end of the spectrum is a pure software RAID such as gmirror. I don't know all that much about the innards but I believe a pure software RAID run on JBOD will work with consumer grade drives just fine most of the time.
The in-between caveat is the so-called 'fakeraid' sets of controllers. These are what you're most likely to find as a cheap 'feature-add' on a consumer desktop motherboard. Things like Intel RAID Matrix and such are known not to work well with non-Windows environments. However, much of the time these will still work fine if RAID functionality is turned off in BIOS and the connected drives are JBOD, with a pure software RAID applied instead of trying to utilize the motherboard BIOS RAID. My web development server at home has a pair of Raptors on an ICH5 controller with gmirror and has been completely trouble free for about a year now. I'd stay away from the "Green" drives that spin down all the time. Even a pure software RAID solution is likely not going to be happy with them. -Mike _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
