Michael's Daemonic Doodles

In my last post I wrote about how the Adaptec 5805 RAID controller was the wrong choice for our backup server. So I started some research, based on the following criteria:

• Production quality driver (so no more crashes, hangs and other weird behavior)
• Pass-through support (/dev/passX), including S.M.A.R.T.
• JBOD support (disks should show up as devices /dev/daX)
• Decent throughput
• Existing success stories with ZFS
• Reasonable price and availability

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One of the less maintained machines in our data center is a small backup server. It's basically sitting there, storing all those backups nobody really uses and slowly fills up its disk array. Once in a while somebody checks it manually to see if everything's in order (it has never been really connected to anything sitting on its own isolated VLAN).

The server uses an Adaptec 5805 controller, a product line I tried debugging and fixing a long time ago (see also http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-bugs/2009-June/035612.html). Unfortunately back then our supplier stated that this is the only controller certified for this machine - so I gave in, hoping that a pretty much bored backup server won't have too much trouble keeping up with the little load it would get.

I was wrong.

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