Quote:
But I'm redoing it again now -- my experiment didn't pan out


Well that makes me feel a whole lot better

If you have problems it must be nearly impossible for me to do it!

Amazingly I got a knock on my door about an hour ago, it was the postman. I bid on one of the LSI cards the otherday and it's turned up already! £35 (US$65 ?) no bad!

Within the hour I have FreeNAS running, RAID5 working and the box sat on my network taking files. Certainly pain free to this point. I haven't however figured out how to tell the array is healthy to start with, and of course haven't tested it yet for drive failure/recovery.

On thing I have noticed is speed, so far this seems to be much slower than the software solution, but maybe this is because the array is still building in the background, the drive are certainly running, or maybe the card won't let them power down?

I still want to try the software approach due to some of the arguments put forward in the thread, I just need a slightly less painful experience.

Cheers

Cris.