Hi David, On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 11:16 AM, David Dyer-Bennet <d...@dd-b.net> wrote: > My current home fileserver (running Open Solaris 111b and ZFS) has an ASUS > M2N-SLI DELUXE motherboard. This has 6 SATA connections, which are > currently all in use (mirrored pair of 80GB for system zfs pool, two > mirrors of 400GB both in my data pool). > > I've got two more hot-swap drive bays. And I'm getting up towards 90% > full on the data pool. So, it's time to expand, right? > > I have two approaches in contention: > > #1, I can just swap drives for bigger drives, waiting for resilver and > taking the risk that the other drive will fail during the resilver (I do > have backups, plus I've got the old removed drive as well, so I could > recover from a failure during resilver with some downtime). > > #2, I can find or install two additional SATA ports and put two more > drives in the open bays. I've even got two 400GB drives sitting > available; that's a 50% increase on current storage, so I'm not inclined > to spend money for new drives yet, even though these are quite small. (I > picked up a pile of free Sun-badged Hitachi 400GB drives when the project > I was on at the time decided they were too small to use and put them out > for people to take home. I grabbed two right away, and very > conscientiously stayed away for a while to give other people a good shot > too. But I took another drive every hour, and left with 7 of them. There > were still some there when I left, so I feel virtuous rather than greedy.) > > I prefer approach two. Three pair gives me more flexibility and more > performance than two, plus I don't have to pay for new drives right away > since I've got spare 400GB drives around. Plus it probably bothers me > more than it should that I'm "wasting" two of the fairly expensive > hot-swap bays. > > So, with regard to option #2, I have two questions. > > First, there's some sign that this motherboard has an integral raid > controller. Can it also be used to drive bare drives? If I could just > find two more usable controller ports (with good drivers and hot-swap > support), I'd be happy without spending any money. Anybody understand > this motherboard? > > Second, if I have to buy an additional controller, what should I buy for > driving two (or at most 4; I suppose it might make sense to reduce the > load on the motherboard controller) SATA drives from this motherboard? I > believe I have a free PCI-Express x16 slot and two x1 slots (and don't > understand these new-fangled ports very well). I want stability, +- 10% > performance is not at all important. Cheap is good :-) (paying my own > money here!). > > (Obvious additional choices like replacing the whole box are not > interesting; its performance is fine for my needs, and it can easily > handle increased disk capacity.) > > Also, I probably should upgrade to more recent code than snv_111b, eh? > What's a demonstrated-to-be-stable code level I could upgrade to? I'm not > desperately missing any of the newer features, but I'm looking for bug > fixes, especially any that relate to zfs send-receive, which I'm > attempting to use to transfer incremental backups to an external USB drive > (set up as a single-disk pool). > > Also I will put more memory in while I've got it open, but I can figure > out what memory it takes for myself :-). > > I'd greatly appreciate motherboard expertise, controller advice, and code > version advice from people with experience. Thanks! > -- > David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/ > Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ > Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ > Dragaera: http://dragaera.info > > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss >
I have the same motherboard. Though I haven't used all of the SATA ports, I also have an ST Lab PCIe SATA II 300 RAID Card, 2+2 (uses a PCIe 1X port, has Sil3132 chip). I've had the card for almost 2 years now, so I'm not sure if you can still buy these. The key thing: the Sil3132 is supported in OpenSolaris. Hope this helps! _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
