I got hold of a nice surplus Dell big desktop (more like a desk-under) from the office. It’s old but in very good condition. Some sub-2GHz P4 that takes Rambus(!) RAM. It comes with 256MB and I doubt very much I’ll bother acquiring more to put in. Perfect timing to replace my old PII home server which was getting unreliable.
Long story short: I put a 300GB SATA HD (bought earlier) and a 320GB SATA HD (bought recently) into the machine, and plugged them into a cheapo SATA “RAID” controller. I didn’t use the RAID feature, and only used it as a straight SATA controller, as I was going to use the excellent gmirror feature of FreeBSD.
Well it wasn’t easy. Installation was fine until extracting the port (tons of software) tree, during which the machine kept hanging. So I skipped that part and extracted the port manually. However, I kept getting timeouts and the machine kept crashing. A Google search told me that the cheapo SATA card which is based on the SiL 3112 chipset, is just JUNK. A fscking waste of another good evening fighting inferior hardware.
The problem is, most modern motherboards these days come with 4-8 SATA ports, so all the cheapo SATA controller cards are really cheap and JUNK. On the other side of the spectrum you have those expensive hardware RAID SATA controllers, but there is nothing in between readily available on the market. Adaptec makes an inexpensive SATA controller, but that is also based on the SiL 3112 chipset and is therefore no good for me.
I went out to Wanchai yesterday lunch time and bought myself a nice 3ware 2-port SATA controller for ~HK$1,200. There are other models (e.g. Promise makes a 4-port version which is just under HK$1,800 which is also well supported by all the Free OSes) but 300GB of mirrored storage space would do for now.
Installation was smooth as silk. It is easy to use, and any decent OS sees the two disks connected to the controller as one. Rebuilding of the RAID set is handled by the card hardware in the background, so upon crash or hardware failure the machine could come back on into a usable state quickly. Let me illustrate the difference between this and mother running RAIDframe (software RAID) on OpenBSD: if mother crashes leaving the RAID set in an unclean state, upon reboot it would take about an hour to rebuild the 80GB RAID sets before it could be usable. In contrast with hardware RAID the machine would reboot directly into a usable state while the controller card would then rebuild the RAID set in the background. Highly recommended for any important workstation, and I think we really should get one for mother. 3ware makes a 2-port IDE RAID card perfect for the job.
Now I have 190GB of fast safe empty space on my personal server. Life is too short to struggle with inferior hardware.