[BBLISA] Fileserver opinion

[Daniel Feenberg]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 1:55 PM, Ian Stokes-Rees
<ijstokes at crystal.harvard.edu> wrote:
>
> Diligent readers will recall the thread a few weeks ago on slow disk
> performance with a PATA XRaid system from Apple (HFS, RAID5).  Having

Possibly this should be a new thread, but...

We have been using ZFS under FreeBSD for a while, and are very pleased,
but are considering building a system with SAS drives, in the hope that they
will be faster (any truth to that?). I am assuming that I should look for a
non-RAID controller, but I can't find any SAS controllers that don't claim
to do RAID and are on the FreeBSD compatibility list. I have always thought
that using a RAID controller for a non-raid partition was a bad idea, since
it limited ones ability to swap controllers. Is that prejudice justified? Is
there a non-RAID controller that might work with FreeBSD?  We already
tried a Promise 4650 (an inexpensive RAID controller and it does not work
(no surprise, it isn't on the HCL).

Daniel Feenberg