thanks for all the great responses! i now have two new bits of information; the onboard SATA is compatible, and there are only 3 drive bays (which likely explains why the previous admin only had 3 disks) ... there is a tiny bit of room in the case below the drive bays that i believe i could mount a 2.5" disk, in order to achieve 4, but the current disks are 3.5 and i'm seriously considering just replacing them all with consumer SSD devices in mirrored pairs without additional slog to see what happens. i'm thinking crucial mx200 or samsung evo in this case ... unless someone can tell me for sure that's a bad plan, i'll just see what happens and maybe report back here later.
----- On Jun 17, 2015, at 6:44 AM, Jack Downes <[email protected]> wrote: Sorry about that... typos, yay. On 06/16/2015 01:21 PM, Mark Creamer wrote: Careful with that link... I believe you actually want goharddrive.com (2 "d") The other one looks like a potential malware trap. :-) mc On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 10:49 PM, Jack Downes < [email protected] > wrote: BQ_BEGIN I'd have to echo Sebastian mostly. Zfs is great, but the underlying hardware is... what is. add another 1 tb drive and put that as Raid 10 (stripe the mirrors), and it'll perform pretty decently. You'd be surprised. If you have the money, yeah, SSD is fantastic, but wow... if you are trying to get reasonable size, you'll spend some cash. Perhaps in this case that doesn't matter. If you have the money for SSD drives, you might consider getting 4 reasonable 2TB drives (they sell them for $50 each on gohardrive.com anymore for WD RE4 or Hitachi Ultrastars now), and then putting some budget into a smartOS compatible PCI-SSD drive. Be careful on that - it's easy to get the wrong drive, but it's not that hard to get the right one either! That way you'd have your 4 spindles, raid 10 with a slog, it'd be decent that way, IMHO. On 06/15/2015 07:07 PM, [email protected] wrote: BQ_BEGIN one of my clients owns a supermicro-based box with 4 hot-swap sata bays. it has integrated SATA and (i believe) no SAS. the original admin populated it with (3) 1TB SATA disks and commissioned it as a fileserver (simple raid5). it has 32GB of memory. the box is no longer being used, so it's been allocated to me for the purpose of hosting another windows server. i'd like to virtualize the server via smartos/kvm but i have reservations. i believe i can get away with using only 16GB for VMs, so that leaves 16GB for smartos/zfs - i think that'll probably work well. but i seriously doubt those disks will give anything resembling decent performance. i only have 4 bays to work with, and only one is currently free. for a windows server VM hosting a multi-user database, would adding a SATA SSD as log device for the zones zpool keep me out of hot water here or is this just not going to work? obviously i can try to source a supported SAS controller and disks, but i'm wondering if i can actually get by with SATA ... what if i filled the (4) 3.5" bays with SSDs and striped across two mirrors? would that mostly guarantee decent performance, or will that just waste time and money? experienced opinions greatfully accepted! ------------------------------------------- smartos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/26849696-e427f2da Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Jack Downes ------------------------------------------- smartos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/23055384-4ad60763 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com BQ_END -- Mark smartos-discuss | Archives | Modify Your Subscription BQ_END -- Jack Downes Unique Solutions, Inc. E: [email protected] or [email protected] P: 406.387.4242 F: 406.387.4541 smartos-discuss | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------- smartos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/25769125-55cfbc00 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=25769125&id_secret=25769125-7688e9fb Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
