Okay, since it looks like I didn't get caught in the layoffs, I'm looking for the hardware platform to run the home disk server on. ZFS is the goal.
Definitely SATA, not SCSI. Since I want to make the boot disk a redundant mirror, and need at least two mirror pairs for data, that seems to say 6 hot-swap bays is the minumum possible. Needs to run Solaris and ZFS. Needs enough CPU horsepower for this, local shell users doing file editing, email, and news (say 5 of them), light web server and database (development, not production). Require ECC memory. I'm probably not willing to pay for redundant power. I want a decently quiet system (office/bedroom environment; mind you, there've been 4 systems running 24/7 there for years plus a window air conditioner); not the noise levels I hear in rackmount systems intended for labs. So -- Supermicro AW4020-C? That's 8 hot-swap bays, always nice to have spare space. It has their H8DCE motherboard, which is on the HCL. That's a dual-Opteron board, dual-core ready, so I can spend a nearly-infinite amount of money on CPUs, which I probably don't need; One dual-core CPU to start with, 2GB memory (ECC memory, definitely). And is there anything cheaper that's a reasonable choice, known to work? This configuration comes out over $2k with 2 80GB drives (system mirror) and 2 500GB drives (ZFS pool, mirrored). I probably don't need that fancy a motherboard; a single dual-core processor is such a huge improvement over what I have now :-). But so many lesser boards don't support ECC. While I'm still sold on the idea of more reliable storage for my wife's books and my photos, this is feeling darned expensive. It can certainly grow for a while, in processor power, memory, and disk space, if needed. Will I have trouble exporting ZFS filesystems via SAMBA? Will some kind of PC-NFS work better? And what about a MAC (client, I mean)? And will this model take an IPMI card? It's not listed as an option on the Supermicro site. -- David Dyer-Bennet, <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/> RKBA: <http://www.dd-b.net/carry/> Pics: <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/> Dragaera/Steven Brust: <http://dragaera.info/> _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
