Disk controller recommendation please

[three_jeeps]

Hi:
I am cobbling together some hardware for a FreeNAS box. I plan on using a ITX form factor board that will support 2 GB RAM (maybe 4GB - dont recall at the moment). Unfortunately it only has PATA interface so I am considering getting a PCI disk controller. At the moment, I plan on running a RAID 1 configuration - basically disk mirroring. Definitely not considering any other RAID architectures.

So my question is: What is a reasonable cost & performance multiple disk PCI controller card to get that works well and is well supported under FreeNAS??


A second question, not hardware related but thought I'd throw it out, is, how well does FreeNAS work as a backup solution?
I have 3 OS' (XP, Ubuntu, and OSX) and basically want to rsynch my files to the FreeNAS box periodically.

Thanks
-J

 

[hibble]

2GB RAM is very low for ZFS so sick with UDF. 4GB does work but expect it to be slow using swap once you load the box with > 1TB of data etc..

For the controler here is the hcl any that are listed and avaliable as a pci card should work fine.
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.3R/hardware.html#DISK

If your intention is only backup by rsync then it will work fine if not setting any new speed records. 2 main modes of use with freenas
1) use zfs and setup daily/weekly snapshot and just "rsync --delete" e.g let zfs do the snapshots. I use this to keep daily rsyncs of 5 PC's files, can use previus virsions under the share on windows to brows all the old verions. do not be confused by deduplication it will reduce a 4Gb system to a crawl.
2) use UDF but lose the ability to make snapshots so you will need to manualy,or another backup program to organise the backups.