[darkpuppet]

I'm doing software RAID -- ZFS to be exact, which is much more robust than RAID5 and a good tradeoff for performance, robustness, and space.

My reason for going software RAID is simple. If I go with something RAID 5-like, and you blow a controller card, you stand to lose EVERYTHING on your disks if you can't replace it with an identical controller, since they all use different striping and parity algorithms that may not be compatible with each other.

With software RAID, if I lose a controller card, I just swap in another and I'm good to go. And I'm still able to get 70MB/s reads and 30-40MBps writes easily across my gigabit network.

However, freeNAS has a few quirks...

- it doesn't support SATA300 via multiple PCI Express cards very well. This results in a lot of DMA read/write issues that'll stop all file serving and require a hardboot.

- this same issue requires a lot of playing around with disk timeouts and transfer modes which don't always work as advertised.

- Samba support is quirky. You'll have to hit the forums to find settings to optimize your throughput and reduce client pipeline issues. Typical of Linux users, the blame is typically put on windows, but the changes need to be made on the linux server.

- if you're using ZFS, you need to make sure you configure it right the first time -- the web gui and os level commands aren't linked properly just yet, so changes made at the command line aren't reflected in the webgui, and once configured, it's very difficult to make changes outside of adding/removing a drive.

- the upgrade process isn't the most robust... I've lost data on occasion.

So there you have it.. there's a few quirks, but overall, it works well enough. I look forward to the point where it becomes more stable so it doesn't need to be babysat so much.

oh yeah... I'm using 2 x Sabrent PCI Express SATA cards... nice cards outside the fact that freeBSD doesn't seem to like multiple client file transfers over SATA300.