I am looking for ideas and best practices for setting up a new box with redundant disks.
The box is a DELL that has two SATA channels and supports "Adaptec CERC SATA RAID". This is said to work with aac(4).
What I want to be able to do is:
(1) rebuild the mirror set in the event that a disk fails, likely on much larger disks that will be current in 4 years time,
(2) extract the data using some other hardware, in the event that the hardware fails, and
(3) maybe take one of the disks, stuff it in a USB drive shell and connect to to a working system and be able to extract the data.
Now the Adaptec CERC has the main point in its favour that it is built into the BIOS, so configuring and rebuilding an array seems simple. It is also nominally supported by FreeBSD so that's great.
On the minus side:
The 2-way Adaptec CERC is a software-only thing, so presumably aac(4) is doing all the real work in software anyway.
Folks say that the Adaptec drivers are flaky, mainly because Adaptec is very closed with their specs
CERC is built into the BIOS, so moving the drives to other hardware that doesn't handle CERC could result in utter lossage.
If I want to use RAID1/mirroring, what is my best way forward with a software-only solution? aac(4) doesn't feel like a particularly safe bet.
The box is a DELL that has two SATA channels and supports "Adaptec CERC SATA RAID". This is said to work with aac(4).
What I want to be able to do is:
(1) rebuild the mirror set in the event that a disk fails, likely on much larger disks that will be current in 4 years time,
(2) extract the data using some other hardware, in the event that the hardware fails, and
(3) maybe take one of the disks, stuff it in a USB drive shell and connect to to a working system and be able to extract the data.
Now the Adaptec CERC has the main point in its favour that it is built into the BIOS, so configuring and rebuilding an array seems simple. It is also nominally supported by FreeBSD so that's great.
On the minus side:
The 2-way Adaptec CERC is a software-only thing, so presumably aac(4) is doing all the real work in software anyway.
Folks say that the Adaptec drivers are flaky, mainly because Adaptec is very closed with their specs
CERC is built into the BIOS, so moving the drives to other hardware that doesn't handle CERC could result in utter lossage.
If I want to use RAID1/mirroring, what is my best way forward with a software-only solution? aac(4) doesn't feel like a particularly safe bet.